ASHEVILLE – Growing up here in the 1960s and 70s, John Winkenwerder was a good athlete and loved to play sports.
But he never got to play baseball because the season conflicted with his job as a cook in the family restaurant on Tunnel Road.
Winkenwerder today is a co-owner and managing partner of South Asheville Hotel Associates, which owns three Hampton Inns and a Homewood Suites by Hilton in Buncombe County.
The 58-year-old is in the third generation of Winkenwerders to make a living in the hospitality industry in Asheville and has been a leader in the local business community for decades.
He said people who think the profits from tourism go to corporate headquarters outside the region aren’t aware that even though many Asheville hotels have national brand names, they are often owned by local residents, as his company is.
“Anybody I know in our industry wants to be a partner in our community,” he said. “We live here, too.”
Winkenwerder’s grandfather managed a country club in Milwaukee until he bought a motor court in southern Georgia and moved there in the late 1930s.
He sold the property during World War II and the family was driving back home when they stayed in a North Asheville motor court called the Tour-O-Tel on Merrimon Avenue, then a major route for northbound traffic.
“The fellow there was displeased that he’d gotten into the motor court business, and my grandfather was like, ‘Really? Well, I’d like to buy it,'” Winkenwerder said.
When Winkenwerder’s father and uncle returned home from serving in the war, they expanded the family business to include the Town-O-Tel motor court on Merrimon just a little north of where Interstate 240 is today. They then bought what became the Mountaineer Inn on Tunnel Road and opened Wink’s Drive-In on Tunnel a short distance east of Beaucatcher Tunnel.
Later came a motel and restaurant where a Super 8 hotel stands on Tunnel Road today; that ended any baseball aspirations John Winkenwerder might have enjoyed.
“My sister in the morning would be the cashier, my brother would be seating people, and I would be in the kitchen cooking and washing dishes,” he said. “We weren’t managing anything. We were part of the workforce.”
Winkenwerder’s sister and brother developed other careers, but Winkenwerder stuck with the family business.
In the late 1980s, he looked at industry trends and decided it was time to move to more upscale properties with interior corridors. At age 31, Winkenwerder recruited four local investor/partners and built his company’s first Hampton Inn near what is now Asheville Outlets on Brevard Road.
Other Hamptons followed near Asheville Regional Airport and on Tunnel Road. The company’s Homewood Suites by Hilton is also on Tunnel Road.
The company employs about 140 people and, Winkenwerder says, has grown as the local tourism market changed from being busy during summer and a couple of weeks in October to a year-round enterprise drawing people looking for everything from an unusual new beer to fine arts and crafts.
While still in his 20s, Winkenwerder was vice chairman of the first board established to direct spending of the new county hotel-motel room tax in the early 1980s. He later chaired the board for several years and was chairman of the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce.
“Tourism, I believe, is never the total answer to the total strength of a community, but it sure is a great piece to have,” he said.
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