Support Asheville Hospitality Workers

Hello! My name is Charlie and I work at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina. As you probably know, we are currently recovering from a once-in-a-generation natural disaster. Hurricane Helene dropped over forty trillion gallons of water on Western North Carolina over the course of a few days and the destruction in the region was catastrophic. Entire towns were wiped off the map. The French Broad River, which I live a few blocks from, broke its banks by 200 feet in both directions.

Helene hit on Friday, September 27th. The timing could not be worse. Asheville is a town dependent on tourism and our busy season is autumn, which generally kicks into gear in late September. October is our busiest month of the year as it’s peak leaf season. November is second, and then for those of us at the Grove Park Inn, our biggest month of the year is December as that is “Gingerbread Season” when we host the world’s largest gingerbread house competition.

The summer of 2024 was already kind of a weak season for us. This was predicted. After two years of post-Covid “revenge travel” the hospitality industry in Asheville was expected to contract, and it did. We’ve all been through weak summers before. I took on a second part-time job driving Lyft to make up for it, some picked up extra shifts, some just tightened their belts. The service industry in Asheville had not completely recovered from Covid when Helene struck.

What we weren’t expecting was to lose our busy season completely. Nobody saw this coming, not the local industry, not the meteorologists, not FEMA. Asheville is not expected to get city water service back for weeks-to-months. Without water, local restaurants and hotels cannot operate. The Blue Ridge Parkway, one of our main tourist attractions, is closed indefinitely pending major repairs.

Everything in Asheville is interconnected. The Biltmore Estate, the Grove Park Inn, and the Blue Ridge Parkway are all closed for the time being, and that means every smaller hotel, restaurant, bar, and tourist attraction in Asheville is effectively out of commission. Asheville has the most expensive housing market in the state of North Carolina and even in good times every worker here pays a premium to live here. Without help, many service industry workers will be forced to move to more affordable places which in turn will put fatal pressure on the very businesses tourists come here to enjoy.

100% of funds donated will go directly to unemployed hospitality workers in Asheville and the region through direct transfer. Once the goal has been met, additional funds will also be dispersed to World Central Kitchen, which has been supplying hot meals to Asheville during this crisis, the Southern Smoke Foundation which provides funding for out-of-work food and beverage employees during emergencies, and the Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity. If you’ve ever come to Asheville and fallen in love with it, please donate to the people that work every day to make your experience memorable. Thank you.