Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994 TAG: 9407150006
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Jeff DeBell
DATELINE: ASHEVILLE, N.C. LENGTH: Long
Roanoke Valley tourism proponents often cite Asheville as a worthy model.
Asheville casts admiring eyes upon the successes of Charleston, S.C. Charleston looks at - who knows?
The truth, said Carolyn Ketchum, is that each place needs just to be itself.
``Find out exactly who you are and go after that niche,'' she said. ``Roanoke maybe won't be Asheville. Asheville won't be Charleston.''
Ketchum is executive director of the Asheville Convention and Visitors Bureau, which promotes the area with a staff of 12 and a budget of $2 million-plus. It's a department of the Asheville Chamber of Commerce.
``We didn't go out and create anything new,'' she said. ``We marketed what we had. We put a ribbon on it.''
What Asheville had to put ribbons on were its mountain setting, the elegant Biltmore Estate and the Blue Ridge Parkway.
The mountains were there when Asheville was founded in the 18th century on the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers. Today, the city benefits from its proximity to Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Pisgah National Forest.
The 9,000-acre Biltmore Estate is what remains of the 125,000-acre property of the late George Vanderbilt, grandson of 19th-century American railroad and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. Its centerpiece is the opulent Biltmore House, a 250-room mansion completed in 1895 and still containing many of the elegant furnishings, art and other objects collected by Vanderbilt in his travels around the world.
The estate has been open for public tours since 1930. A spokeswoman said there are about 750,000 visitors per year.
The parkway is the scenic road that winds its way for 469 miles among the crests and valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains between Asheville and Rockfish Gap (near Waynesboro, Va.). One of the country's most popular tourist attractions (and the top draw in North Carolina), it had nearly 23 million visitors in 1993.
The Roanoke Valley has no Biltmore Estate. It does have the Blue Ridge Mountains and the parkway, though it is perceived to be less successful than Asheville at luring travelers off the scenic road.
This isn't provable, as no one knows exactly how many people leave the parkway to visit either community. It does seem likely, however.
One reason is that Asheville is near the parkway's southern terminus. It's a logical place for southbound travelers to get off.
Another is that Asheville is, well ... Asheville. It's known for tourism and has been since wealthy visitors began coming here for the mountain air in the last century.
``A lot of it is history,'' Ketchum said. ``It's a matter of who went into it first, who marketed it first, who developed it first.''
Asheville, of course, did. Roanoke, with its rail and industrial heritage, is a relative newcomer to tourism.
Ketchum said there's no reason it can't succeed, even without a major attraction like the Biltmore. She points out that Charleston, S.C., has no such place but has succeeded by marketing its history.
While a destination attraction may not be imperative, she said, an identifiable destination is.
``Roanoke's got a lot. It's a matter of picking something" to emphasize, even if the decision is to emphasize the valley as the hub or gateway to other attractions.
``You have to grow incrementally,'' Ketchum said. ``That gives you the time for the community to grow and adjust with it.''
Tourism in Asheville has been growing for more than a century. By 1991 it had grown to the point that direct tourism revenue in Buncombe County, of which Asheville is the seat, amounted to $269 million. The industry that year employed 6,740 people with an annual payroll of $75 million.
The industry gets some of the credit for the steady revitalization of downtown Asheville, where trendy Wall Street shops and businesses like the Blue Spiral Gallery and Haywood Place, a retail/restaurant development inside a former department store, are opening to locals and visitors alike.
Pack Place, a new museum and theater complex, that is similar to Roanoke's Center in the Square, drew 92,000 visitors in 1993, its first full year of operation. Fifty-two percent of the visitors were out-of-towners.
Between 1983 and 1991, more than 1,500 hotel rooms were added in Asheville and Buncombe County. They gave a 44 percent boost to property taxes from lodging establishments.
They also were of vital importance to the Asheville Convention and Visitors Bureau, which relies on the 3 percent county room tax for most of its budget.
Revenue from the tax is dedicated to advertising and promotion outside the immediate area. In fiscal 1993, the tax yielded $1.8 million.
Most was spent to promote Asheville in the Southeast, regarded as the area's primary source of travelers.
A bureau marketing study concluded that people are taking fewer long trips, but that the appeal of a `getaway' long weekend wass growing. "Asheville's Blue Ridge Mountains location, and proximity to cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Columbia, Greensboro and Raleigh make it an ideal romantic weekend escape.''
Asheville promotes itself accordingly, portraying the city and Buncombe County as the base from which visitors can branch out to explore other communities and the scenic and recreational attractions therein.
Asheville has a cooperative promotional arrangement with Charleston and is working on a similar deal with Gatlinburg, a tourist-oriented mountain community in Tennessee.
``We're all in the Smokies,'' Ketchum said. ``Who cares about state lines?"
Implicit in the bureau's marketing plan is an emphasis on the tourist (individually or by the busload) as opposed to convention business. About 80 percent of the Asheville bureau's activity is tourist-oriented, which makes it the reverse of most bureaus. (The Roanoke Valley bureau's emphasis is 70 percent convention, 30 percent tourist.)
The Asheville Convention and Visitors Bureau is accessible from Interstate 240, the main spur from Interstate 40, and from downtown. In 1992-93, according to bureau records, there were 103,000 walk-ins requesting information or other help.
The bureau gets an estimated 900 annual ``relocation inquiries'' from people thinking of moving to Asheville. Those who are interested in moving their residences to the area are handled by the bureau.
Those who are thinking of moving businesses to Asheville are ushered upstairs to talk with someone in the Chamber of Commerce.
Such immigration is welcomed. Small businesses are the backbone of the area's economic structure, as they are in most places. Ketchum and others can rattle off the names of businesses whose owners or managers first visited as tourists.
``Family-owned businesses contribute more to the community,'' Ketchum said. ``The CEO lives here. His kids are being educated here.''
Another group of immigrants is retirees, more and more of whom settle in the Asheville area or have summer homes there.
According to the chamber's acting director, Robert Kendrick, these retirees tend to be well-educated and well-traveled and to have ``fairly high discretionary income.'' They make few demands on the infrastructure, he said, and are active citizens. Many serve as volunteers.
The upside of the phenomenon is that the retirees enhance Asheville's quality of life. The downside is that they tend to raise property costs enough for it to be felt by other, less well-heeled residents.
And, Ketchum said, there is a drawbridge mentality among some of them. Once they're settled, they may oppose further growth of the city.
The attitude is understandable but misguided, in Carolyn Ketchum's view.
"If the community doesn't grow, it'll die," she said.
by CNB