Gatlinburg is open for business

GATLINBURG – Ron Crivellone has a simple answer when customers call about getting married in the Smokies this spring.

“I’m pretty much telling them that we are open for business,” he says. “They best way you can help the area is to come spend money.”

He’s the president of the Smoky Mountain Wedding Association and owner of Smoky Mountain Sounds, a wedding DJ business.

The wedding industry is huge in the Gatlinburg-Pigeon Forge-Sevierville area. Sevier County, Tennessee, is third in the nation for the number of chapel weddings – right behind Las Vegas and New York, he says.

Barn weddings are a big draw here.

Crivellone once did a country wedding, complete with cowboy hats, for a couple from New York. They told him they could have done it back home, but it wouldn’t have looked right.

Like many business owners in this tourism-depending community, Crivellone is worried about the lingering impact of last fall’s forest fires.

The Chimney Tops 2 fire killed 14 people in the Gatlinburg area and destroyed half a billion dollars in property. Entire neighborhoods were wiped out.

As if the tragic loss of life and property wasn’t bad enough, Gatlinburg now has an image problem.

The wall-to-wall news coverage of the fire left the impression that Gatlinburg was destroyed, says Logan Coykendall, president and CEO of Hospitality Solutions, Inc.

That’s far from the truth.

The downtown, arts and crafts community, and many other places, suffered no damage.

“Our two real gems of tourism were left untouched and they are ready, willing and able to take care of visitors,” he said.

His company owns the Hilton Garden Inn, the Courtyard by Marriott and the Hampton Inn in Gatlinburg. It manages the historic Gatlinburg Inn. In Pigeon Forge, the company manages a second Hampton Inn and Hilton Garden Inn.

The company suffered $2.5 million in smoke and wind damage. Seventeen employees lost everything.

Taking care of those employees has been a top priority for his company, and many others, in town.

Hospitality Solutions assigned a full time staffer to help workers find housing. It raised $50,000 internally to help staff get resettled.

The money paid for the first few months of rent and furnishings among other needs.

Today, everyone has a place to live and is ready to work.

Coykendall, like others here, sees a bright future for business in Gatlinburg.

The company is investing $30 million this year in new hotels and $30 million more in the next three years.

But the business has to come back to make it a real success story, he says.

“The best way to help us recover is to come visit us and see how beautiful the area still is,” he says.

Even the places that burned inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park, like the Chimneys trail, present new opportunities. Watching how the environment rebuilds will be something visitors can count on again and again.

“I think it’s going to be neat to see what happened to those areas that did burn as they rejuvenate,” he says.

Jackie Leatherwood, general manager of Greystone Lodge on the River, shares Coykendall’s concerns but she’s also optimistic.

“We are booming with new opportunities,” she says. “If you come to town, and you just drive through the center of town, you don’t even really know there has been a fire in our area, because out downtown is still intact.”

Like many hotels here, her 241-room inn suffered smoke damage. It has since been professionally cleaned.

She made sure to take the time to do the job right.

“When my guests walk in the front doors, I want them to have the experience they had prior to the fires,” she says.

She’s telling customers they can expect the same great experience across Gatlinburg when they call asking about the aftermath of the fire.

“You just ask people to come and see for themselves,” she says. “Come and see it come and experience it and be part of our come back.”

Right now the focus is on attracting the spring break crowds.

Leatherwood’s confident but, like Coykendall, she worries about the long-term impact on the workforce if the spring season is soft.

“You have workers that are working in these restaurants who need to make a living through the winter,” she says. “So wee need the people to come back to help. I think people want to be a part of that and they will come back.”