Fresh report from the ground in the Smokies, and some needed perspective

[Collin Hays]

I spent the last six days in the TN side of the Smokies visiting various areas, from Cosby all the way to Cades Cove and Townsend. I drove around a lot, looking at activity and talking to merchants.  I talked to waiters and waitresses, store clerks, park rangers, and small business owners.  This is peak summer.  

Although I sound like a broken record, traffic is down. Yes, there is an oversupply of cabins, but I would estimate that it is only about 2200 cabins per night.  That sounds like a lot, and it is. But if traffic was a bit higher - even 5 percent - most of those cabins would be rented out. 

Let's talk about traffic a bit more. It would seem that we could look at GSMNP's visitor numbers and easily gauge where we are.  The only problem with that is, GSMNP adjusted their calculation methods last year. So garbage in, garbage out.  We won't be able to draw any statistical conclusions from that for several years.  That means we are all looking for data points as to what we have today versus say a decade ago.  To figure out exactly how far we are "down" in visitors, I took one of our 1-bedroom premium cabins, smack in the middle of Gatlinburg in the Black Bear Falls area, and looked at the occupancy history dating back to 2018.  I consider this cabin a bellwether of sorts for the overall market. It isn't THE data point, but A  data point. Here are the occupancy for the following years:

2018  - 74%

2019 - 69%

2020 - 87%

2021 - 92%

2022 - 67%

2023 - 59%

2024 - 53%

It's too early to tell what 2025 will be, but I expect it to be below 50 percent.  Back in 2021, when everyone and his Uber driver were buying cabins to rent out, I often heard "well heck, even if demand (visitors) drops 10 percent, I can easily live on 10 percent less rent."  We all found out that there is a major flaw in that logic.  2021 was the highest number of visitors ever to the GSMNP - around 14 million.  In 2022, that number dropped about 7 percent - to 13 million.  But the occupancy of my premium cabin dropped from 92 percent to 67 percent!

I don't represent myself as a forecaster, but the data from my bellwether cabin says that we will have the smallest number of visitors to the Smokies since I have owned the cabin.  I am not sure where the "bottom" is that we are all looking for. We may be in it now, we may not.

Keep the faith.

[JD Martin]

What you show mirrors exactly what we are seeing in the Four Corners/Disney area. Without any hard facts to back this up, but just talking to people in general, I think the bottom line is just that a large number of people are simply tapped out and can't afford it. Virtually everything has increased in cost dramatically since COVID and people are either scared, broke, or both. 

If someone stays at our house in 4C to take their family to the parks - let's assume a family of 4 and they go to the parks 3 days out of a 7 day stay - they are going to drop over $5k. A 3-day Disney hopper pass is going to be about $500 per person, so that's $2k. Even at cut rates, after VRBO fees and taxes they're going to be at almost $2k for my house. Then they need to eat, get there and get home, and have a little cash for other stuff. A lot of people just can't afford, or stomach dropping $5k on a vacation these days. 

It's not going to really be any different in GSMNP. They might spend less on parks, since outside of Dollywood they're minimized, but they're going to spend more on the cabin and all of the tourist-y things in PF/Gatlinburg. For most people they're not going to stay in the Smokies and spend all their day hiking, driving to overlooks, and fishing in creeks, all cheap/free things. Especially true if they have kids. I know a lot of people that come down here to visit and stay in Gatlinburg & PF and they spend all their time at Ripleys, Dollywood, dinner theatres, etc. 

I grew up really poor so we rarely went on a vacation when I was a kid. When we did go somewhere, it was always somewhere that virtually everything you did was free, which usually meant camping somewhere in the mountains or at a campground near a beach, and all day was spent at the lake or the ocean and if you got to spend a couple bucks on a hot dog and coke it was big doin's. The amount of money people expect they're going to spend on vacations has expanded exponentially and it's just reaching the limit for a lot of strapped people.