Often lost among the attention given downtown’s upscale hotels are the area’s other lodgings.
And there are plenty of them – with more on the way, another sign of the strength of the region’s tourism economy.
Seventeen new hotels with about 1,659 more rooms are expected to come online in the Asheville area during the next few years, according to the most recent data available from the Asheville Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Downtown hotels get the attention largely because of the location alone.
But hotel owners and managers outside the central business district say they, too, have an important role to play in Asheville-area economy, though they face different challenges by virtue of being farther from tourism hotspots.
“They are the last ones to benefit from increased business and the first ones to suffer when business declines,” said Stephanie Brown, the Asheville Convention and Visitors Bureau executive director.
That’s a dynamic that Himanshu Karvir, general manager of the Holiday Inn Asheville—Biltmore West on Smokey Park Highway, would like to change.
Karvir became a first-time board member of the Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority last month.
In that new role, Karvir said he would like to modify Asheville’s tourism marketing message.
“We have a lot of hotels where guests do not have to pay $400 a night,” said Karvir, whose extended family owns four hotels comprising 521 rooms, all outside downtown.
“We don’t want to be known as a place you can’t visit because it’s too expensive,” he said. “We want to send the message out that it’s not.”
By doing so, Karvir said he also hopes that the non-downtown hotels become destination accommodations in themselves, rather than lodging where guests who can’t find rooms downtown ultimately go.
“I like the idea of broadening our (marketing) footprint,” said John Winkenwerder, managing partner of South Asheville Hotel Associates, a company that owns four non-downtown Hilton Hotels and Resorts brand hotels with 430 rooms total. Winkenwerder said he plans to open a fifth Hilton hotel in 2017 on Brevard Road that will have 114 rooms.
Winkenwerder was one of the original Tourism Development Authority board members in 1983 when he was 26.
Hotels outside of downtown are frequently owned by local business people, like Karvir and Winkenwerder, and located in places including Tunnel Road and off I-26, I-40 and I-240.
Room rates for the hotels owned by Karvir and Winkenwerder generally range from $90 to more than $300, depending on the season, both said.
Among the ways Asheville tourism officials could expand the audience they reach would be to promote the city and region as a “stopping-off destination” as travelers drive to other locations such as Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; and the Florida coasts, Winkenwerder said.
The benefits of doing so would be multifold. First, that strategy could draw new visitors to the region, allaying worries of “too much room at the inn.”
That’s crucial because hoteliers must drop room rates to attract guests when they are unable to keep occupancy rates high.
And, it would help the Asheville market continue its evolution toward what Winkenwerder and Karvir describe as mature tourist destinations like Charleston and Savannah.
While validating the concern of a future oversupply of rooms, Brown underscored that Asheville tourism advertising and marketing has not focused on income levels of potential guests.
Instead, she said, the emphasis has been on the diversity of experiences that visitors to the region may have – from participating in sports tournaments, to stopping by the Biltmore Estate, to walking downtown, to driving among the Appalachian Mountains and so on.
Karvir and Winkenwerder agreed educating people of those types of options would benefit all hoteliers.
Ensuring visitors understand that they may participate in such activities, even if they stay in a hotel outside downtown is critical, Karvir said.
The Convention and Visitors Bureau current fiscal year operations budget for marketing is $8.9 million, Brown said.
The projection for next year’s budget is $11.5 million. The increase will come, in part, due to the General Assembly’s approval during the past session to hotel-occupancy tax rate to 6 percent from 4 percent, Brown said.
Hotels in the pipeline
Asheville-area hotel facts
Source: Asheville Convention and Visitors Bureau; City of Asheville Planning and Urban Design Department
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