“Leaders shouldn’t be so focused on turning our area into an amusement park for those with disposable cash to drop on lodging and entertainment.”
Tag: tourism
Showing 43-63 of 164 results
Year in Review: Residents and local leaders reflect on Asheville’s growth and tourism
With growth comes worsening traffic, rising housing costs and long lines of tourists waiting at locally beloved bars and restaurants. But it’s not all bad, as 2021’s Year In Review participants note in their reflections on Asheville’s development and tourism sector. These residents and local leaders shared their growth gripes and hopes as they look forward to the coming year.
Letter: Capital of WNC has problems
“Moving out of this mess in 30 days. Y’all can have it. Going somewhere clean and quiet.”
TDA holds in-person annual meeting
More than 180 guests attended the event at the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium.
Letter: A message from the heavens about Asheville
“One way or another, the Great Being in the Sky will persuade people, mostly Floridians, that Asheville isn’t the haven they once expected.”
Letter: Support needed for environmental justice bill
“Western North Carolina will soon experience environmental degradation because of our legislators’ inability to act on climate policy.”
Q&A with Demp Bradford, president of the Asheville Buncombe Regional Sports Commission
Certain activities are closely associated with Asheville: sampling local craft brews, tubing down the French Broad River, eating one’s own weight in barbecue. If Demp Bradford, president of the Asheville Buncombe Regional Sports Commission, has his way, professional sports will become quintessentially Asheville, too. Bradford, a native of the North Carolina Piedmont, became interested in […]
Letter: Tourism dollars should help with infrastructure
“Tourism dollars should be helping with the infrastructure of the city. To continue to put the burden on taxpayers living here is unfair and unsustainable.”
Letter: Spend occupancy taxes on healing tourism’s impacts
“The tourism fund could be used to provide paying jobs for locals to be out in the parks and forests making sure visitors practice “leave no trace”; park only where they are supposed to; do trail work; and prevent mapless tourists from getting lost in the woods.”
Biz Briefs: Blue Ridge Pride debuts LGBTQ+ business alliance
Blue Ridge Pride, a nonprofit supporting the LGBTQ community in Western North Carolina, launched an online business directory for LGBTQ-owned and inclusive businesses called the Blue Ridge Pride Business Alliance on June 25. The directory, available at BlueRidgePride.org/Business, includes retail, food and drink, leisure and services and other categories. Businesses listed in the BRPBA directory […]
Letter: Support citizen safety efforts first
“Should not the county/city focus on supporting citizen safety efforts before looking at marketing programs targeted at tourism?”
Letter: Reroute half of occupancy taxes to infrastructure
“I think and truly believe it is a travesty that so much of the funds from the occupancy tax are rerouted to advertising for more tourism!”
Letter: Missing the old Asheville
“Downtown did need help, but it didn’t need to be turned into the tourist-oriented, overbuilt, overdeveloped mess that it has become.”
Man handlers
Letter: Stop with the insular local mentality
“I’m tired of people here complaining about growth. Frankly, this small-mindedness reminds me of people in Maine who want to keep out ‘outsiders from away.’”
Canton and Maggie Valley consider additional occupancy tax
House Bill 412 would enable the two Haywood County municipalities to levy a 2% occupancy tax on accommodations like hotels, motels and Airbnbs, which would then be managed by new town-specific tourism development authorities.
BCTDA approves $15.3 million for tourism marketing
Nearly all of the members of the public who commented on the issue expressed concern over the amount of money being spent to draw more tourists to the area and asked that the funds allocated for advertising instead be spent on city infrastructure, schools and reparations for Asheville’s Black residents.
Letter: Asheville needs a population cap
“Asheville’s not weird anymore, and I’m sad about that.”
Letter: Asheville, we need to invest in ourselves
“We need to invest in ourselves — pay living wages, build or convert affordable housing, expand public transportation, house the homeless, focus spending on the people who live here.”
Letter: Will marketing make us ‘Myrtle Beach of the Mountains’?
“Isn’t this like telling a family of eight living in a two-room house that you’re persuading a couple of baseball teams to move in with them?”
Letter: The TDA’s biggest-ever marketing spend
“Before we go hog wild on marketing Asheville to the world, can we pause (or at least more slowly ramp up) to consider what’s best for the city and its inhabitants?”
