CNN
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When Devin DeHoll, co-owner and founder of Asheville Adventure Company, observed the damage caused by Tropical Storm Helene, he knew the business he had built for more than six years would never be the same.
The company operated several rock climbing gyms and developed rafting and e-bike tours around the Asheville area. But four of their five locations in the hard-hit River Arts District were destroyed by the storm.
The storm “almost destroyed our entire company,” DeHoll said. The disaster prompted him to move across the country and dramatically downsize the company while exploring other business opportunities.
DeHoll is one of many entrepreneurs and small business owners whose livelihoods have been disrupted by the storm, which ravaged western North Carolina in September, destroying essential infrastructure and causing catastrophic flooding. Forty-three people were killed in Buncombe County, and the area was left without drinking water until mid-November.
Although life is slowly returning to normal in Asheville, the storm’s effects are long-lasting — and tourism, which has historically formed a core part of the city’s economy, remains a fraction of pre-storm levels.
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Local businesses in Asheville and Buncombe County are expected to see a loss of $585 million in visitor spending during the first quarter of 2025, according to Vic Isley, president and CEO of Explore Asheville.
In 2023, visitors spent “nearly $3 billion” at businesses in Asheville and Buncombe County, accounting for about 20% of the county’s GDP, Isley told CNN on Sunday. Nearly a third of that spending came during the crucial winter months between October and December, when tourists typically flock to view vibrant fall foliage and visit iconic Asheville attractions like Biltmore Village.
“There would be no good time for a storm like Helene, but this could be the worst possible time,” she said.
Several beloved Asheville establishments have been forced to close permanently as a result of the storm, according to Isley, including Pleb Urban Winery and Vivian, a restaurant in the arts district. About 40% of small businesses do not reopen after a natural disaster, according to FEMA.
The storm built on the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had continued to affect Asheville businesses, she said. “These small businesses that were really relying on the fourth quarter to get through the spring are really, really struggling,” she said.
For DeHoll, whose business began in 2018 when he and a business partner started hosting e-bike tours out of a shop, the storm has been disastrous.
Before Helene, the company employed about 100 people, including rafting tour guides and climbing gym workers, he said.
Now, they have a full-time staff member helping them put the pieces together, he said. Guided tours, part of their business, have closed permanently, but one of the climbing gyms reopened last week. DeHoll has moved to Denver, Colorado, where he bought an auto repair shop while helping manage the gym from afar.
In the weeks after the storm, he felt “a crushing weight, because now those six years of investing in your future are just six years of wasted time.”
The storm “was a big rock dropped in a small pond,” DeHoll said. “It will continue to spread to our community in more ways.”
He added that very few business owners had received payments from insurance companies, adding to the difficulty of rebuilding. “A large part of the city was underinsured because no one expected an event like this,” he said.
Helping the city and its small businesses recover will require “patience” and “kindness and care from our entire community,” he said.
Similarly, Nicole Will, founder of Asheville Wellness Tours, which runs yoga retreats and other wellness events, said the storm has required her to reorganize aspects of the business, finding new locations to replace trails and farms. which are closed indefinitely after the storm.
There has been a “dramatic decrease” in income, she said. She described the “heartbreaking” loss of “revenue that all my guides were expecting,” as well as the spike in October revenue that usually supports business during the slower winter months.
“It’s just this uncertainty on all fronts,” Will said. “We expect to be rugged and adaptable and flexible by 2025.”
In addition to tourism and outdoor-based groups, the storm also severely affected the hotel and restaurant industry. Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer told CNN that some retail, hotel and restaurant service workers left the area shortly after the storm because of the lack of work, resulting in a labor shortage.
“Trying to rehabilitate those businesses is a huge challenge,” she said.
And hotels and restaurants that are still operating have had to change their business models, such as restaurants that serve limited menus, according to Lynn Minges, CEO of the North Carolina Restaurant and Lodging Association.
Amid the expected continued loss in tourism revenue, some business owners and leaders stressed the same need to support local businesses: funding.
Right after the storm, “We got a lot of water bottles that were sent to the city and we didn’t get a lot of money,” DeHoll said. “And Asheville will continue to suffer for it.”
Last week, Congress passed a spending bill that includes $100 billion in disaster relief funds. Manheimer described the bill as a “big step in the right direction.”
The bill would defund the Asheville Small Business Administration, which funds “absolutely critical” loans for small businesses, the mayor explained.
Minges, meanwhile, said her association is “optimistic that with the new federal package that was approved, there will be some dollars that may be available to help directly finance business owners.”
“These are small business owners who are already living on thin margins,” she said. “We’re trying to do everything we can to get dollars into the hands of these business owners so they can succeed.”
The North Carolina Restaurant and Lodging Association has raised over $600,000 in grants to support hospitality workers affected by the storm.
And the Always Asheville Fund — an Explore Asheville initiative — has raised more than $1.1 million that has been distributed to small businesses with emergency grants, according to Isley.
Manheimer noted that Asheville had a fairly strong economy before the storm, boasting the lowest unemployment rate in the state.
“This is a country that is coming up and needs some temporary help so it doesn’t see losses during this interim period as we rebuild,” she said.
“We just need, literally, need that bridge,” she said. “We need that bridge to carry us through this time period so we can come out on the other side of it, just like we always do.”
Amid the storm’s lingering aftermath, Asheville officials are stressing that the city is open for business and ready to welcome tourists.
“We are open for business and we need your business,” the mayor said. “There are some parts that will take longer to recover, but there are a lot of parts that are open and you can enjoy them.”
Manheimer added that because so many people “saw tremendous devastation on their televisions for a long time, from this very area,” it’s “hard to imagine that it can recover quickly at all.” But in some parts of the city, “you wouldn’t even know there was a storm.”
Will, the owner of Asheville Wellness Tours, suggested visitors planning a trip to the city intentionally include local small businesses in their travels.
“The positive impact of a guest’s visit to our area can be dramatically increased by adding one (or more!) nights beyond what they would normally plan,” she said. She urged tourists to “spend that extra time intentionally, making sure to interact with small local businesses they may have overlooked in the past.”
Isley promoted the sustainability of the Asheville community.
“In western North Carolina, a lot of people have talked about the strength of the Appalachian people and their pull by the bootstraps,” she said. “That spirit and heart has been fully on display since Helen.”
More than a thousand local Explore Asheville partners have been able to reopen since the storm, she added.
“Asheville residents are welcoming these visitors to our community,” she said. “We need visitors now more than ever.”
She mentioned that there are also ways for people to support Asheville businesses from afar without visiting, such as shopping online from Asheville-based makers. Will also suggested that people who want to support Asheville can donate to funds like Mountain BizWorks and other organizations that support small businesses.
“Travel and hospitality have been part of the fabric of our community, literally, for generations,” Isley said.
Asheville “has been a space for wellness, shelter and creativity, and we simply invite visitors to come support it and ensure it endures for generations to come.”