Good Neighbor Podcast: Tri-Cities
Bringing together local businesses and neighbor of the Tri-Cities region. Good Neighbor Podcast hosted by Skip Mauney helps residents discover and connect with your local business owners in and around The Tri-Cities.
Is your business serving the residents of Tri-Cities? Then, we need to talk! Visit gnpTri-Cities.com to schedule your free interview.
Good Neighbor Podcast: Tri-Cities
EP # 252: Glamping, Cabins, and Southern Hospitality in the Smokies with Hospitable Homes
What makes John and Jenni Faison with Hospitable Homes a good neighbor?
Skip Mauney welcomes John and Jenni Faison, the husband-and-wife team behind Hospitable Homes and Honeysuckle Springs, to explore their unique approach to vacation rentals and camping in the Great Smoky Mountains.
The conversation unfolds with the story of how a simple Airbnb stay in Washington DC sparked a business idea that would transform the Faisons' lives. Beginning in 2015 with just their basement in Raleigh, they gradually expanded to owning multiple properties and eventually relocating to Tennessee where they now operate cabins, a 40-acre campground, and specialty accommodations in the picturesque Smoky Mountains.
What makes their approach special is their comprehensive range of options. At Honeysuckle Springs, guests can experience everything from glamping (glamorous camping with queen-sized memory foam mattresses, mini-fridges, and solar lighting) to bringing their own tents. The Faisons share candidly about the misconceptions people have about their industry, particularly the significant learning curve involved in understanding what guests truly want and need. Their journey hasn't been without challenges – from weather-damaged tents to financial hurdles and property investments during market downturns.
Beyond business strategies, the heart of their operation is genuine hospitality rooted in faith. As John explains, their name reflects a biblical calling to welcome others, which translates into exceptional service and availability to guests. The family aspect adds another dimension, with all four of their children contributing to operations and learning valuable life skills along the way. For those seeking a memorable mountain getaway that balances nature with comfort, the Faisons offer not just accommodations but an experience crafted with true hospitality at its core.
To learn more about Hospitable Homes go to:
https://www.hospitablehomes.com/website
Hospitable Homes
919-345-9575
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Skip Monty.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. So we have two very special guests in the studio with us here today and I'm very fortunate and excited to learn all about them and what they do. If you're like me and you love the mountains, you're going to love these guys and love to hear all about what they do. So because today I have the pleasure of introducing your good neighbors, Mr John and Jenny Faison, who are the owner operators of hospitable homes. John, Jenny, welcome to the show. Well, like I said, we're we're glad to have you, and I love the mountains. I live in the mountains. I think it's the most beautiful place on earth. I know that's not all you guys do. You do have some campgrounds, but why don't you kick us off by telling us all about what you do?
Speaker 3:Well, first of all, I'd like to say I really like the name of your podcast Good Neighbor Podcast. I don't know if that's an intentional reference to the parable that Jesus told about being good neighbors, but that's really the bottom line, for our business model is, we believe and want to be hospitable, and so that's why we have hospitable homes. So we started hospitable homes back in 2015, and we have cabins in the area, and most recently, actually in 2023, we added a campground, and then we also have an RV spot up here in the Great Smoky Mountains, and it's something that we love doing.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome, and you guys are co-owners, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you can definitely say so. We're a team and I don't think anything we've done. We could have done it just one of us definitely. So we work together on everything.
Speaker 3:Well, we also have kids that contribute greatly to our work as well.
Speaker 2:A family affair. Awesome, it is. So how did you guys get into this business?
Speaker 3:Well, that started back in 2015. I went to Washington DC and just happened to be looking for a good place to stay that wasn't expensive, because the place was full. All the hotels were full and I stumbled across Airbnb and found somebody's home to stay in. And I just looked at their calendar one day and started adding the numbers up and going, hmm, this is a pretty good business. So it wasn't long after that we said let's do something ourselves. So we started using our basement and our home in Raleigh, north Carolina, and then we bought a townhouse in North Carolina and then we eventually came here and started doing our work here.
Speaker 2:Very good. Well, what are some myths or misconceptions in your industry?
Speaker 4:I think one of the things is a lot of people think, oh, you have an extra room or you've got a rental house. It's empty. People will start coming and there's nothing to it. You know, just give them a code to the front door. But actually, um, there's a huge learning curve. John and I have had to go through many moments of trial and error, uh, figuring out what is it that people are looking for, how to make a place, um, presentable, how to make something appealing to a vast majority of people, and you know our opinions about what we personally like. They're just not that important. So we've had to think more from the perspective of other people than from, maybe, what we like. And definitely customer service is something that we've also had to be schooled on.
Speaker 3:Well, I would also add, from the campground perspective I think people get locked into is something that we've also had to be schooled on. Well, I would also add from the campground perspective. I think people get locked into what a campground is. Some people immediately think of RVs, which we don't cater to RVs. We have one but and we let we have one spot for small RVs. And then some people think of primitive, where you know you're digging a hole for your toilet and then other people have different.
Speaker 3:But we have tried to offer sort of an experience that includes a lot of those. We don't have primitive camping because we like the convenience of hot and cold running water and clean bathrooms, so we have that. But we also have places where people can bring their own tent. We have a pop-up that somebody can bring their stuff if they don't have a tent. We have tents that are glamping in and we have a little cabin so you can have a camping experience all the way from an RV, which we have, all the way down to bring your own tent and put it up on the site. That's not something you find in a lot of campgrounds. What you find usually is one or two of those things. But we're trying to offer an experience for people, and I say experience because to us it's more than just providing a place for someone to stay. We really want to interact with our guests, if they want that, and help them enjoy the Smoky Mountains, because we love them so much.
Speaker 2:Sounds like you're working a lot outside of work. If there is outside of work, what do you guys like to do for fun?
Speaker 3:Well, we, like the Smoky Mountains so we love to go out on Douglas Lake because that's a beautiful place to see the mountains from the water. We do some hiking, we like to do that. Some of us half the family really, really enjoys the botany and gardening, and my wife's got a huge garden and my one of my daughters is looking for all the appalachian uh things that can be eaten, all the green stuff that's out there that we just cut, cut down or overlook. So we we enjoy that kind of stuff. We in our campground is 40 acres and, uh, was it? 32 of it is is wooded, so we love to spend time in the woods and riding four-wheeler and in the fall, obviously, we we go out right around in the woods looking at the leaves and winter time we play in the snow. So we just love enjoying the smokies. It's like being on vacation not really like being on vacation, but it's living in a vacation land that other people can only come and enjoy occasionally. So we have a passion for enjoying the beauty of the Smokies.
Speaker 2:Same here, same here. We're very fortunate to be able to live here.
Speaker 3:We are.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Grew up in Western North Carolina, coming to the Smokies for vacation in the fall pretty much every year as a kid. So yeah, love it, absolutely love it. Well, let's switch gears for a second. Can you describe either one of you either personal or professional, hardship or life challenge that you've overcome and how it made you stronger coming out the other side? Anything come to mind.
Speaker 4:Well, you know, um, we, john mentioned, we have four kids and we do all of our work together. So what does that mean? You know, we've, we've had to teach our kids what it means to. You know, put your hands to the plow. You know sweat, blood, tears, put all your effort into something and just to give it all, you've got to do a good job. Don't, don't skimp, don't just say it above, do do your very best. And we're learning a lot with our kids, we're learning how to guide them.
Speaker 4:But you know, and there's, there's sometimes when you just you should get to that moment, moment like the end of your rope feeling. You know, and it snowed this winter and a couple of our tents got the, the center poles, the glamping tent, the center pole bent, whatever. The whole thing got caved. That is, I tell you what. That's a big disappointment. You're happy at home looking at the snowfall and you think, oh, what's going on at the campground? You pull up and there's this collapsed thing and you just don't know what's next. But you know, you just have to learn to settle it out and say what do we have? Where can we go from here? How can we save up for another pole or piece of equipment that we need, and how can we take better care of what we've got. And so it's all. It's all sense, it's a, it's a learning journey with our, with our family.
Speaker 3:Add to that we we, we didn't come from a family with money and it has been a slow burn since 2015,. We mortgaged our house to start and then we mortgaged it again by the condo or the townhouse, and then we sold that house to buy something here in Tennessee and it's. It's that's been a real challenge keeping a good credit, finding, finding lenders, buying and selling property so we can move up. And in this different economy it's you know, the 2008 happening. We bought property here in 2008 and paid too much for it because the bottom fell out after that.
Speaker 2:I'm familiar with that.
Speaker 3:So that's financially. You've had a lot of challenges, but it's taught us a lot and I can look back on it and appreciate that.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome. Well, let me ask you a question real quick. You mentioned the glamping tent collapsing. Could you tell us exactly? There's a lot of people that I think don't know what glamping is, particularly like my wife. Her idea of camping is you know.
Speaker 4:Eratoson or something. So what is glamping? Is, you know, erratic or something? So what is glamping? Well, I think we've realized that there's a wide variety of ideas about what glamping actually is. Some people say if it's got air conditioning, then I'll call it glamping. If it doesn't know, glamping is a put together word it's glamorous camping.
Speaker 4:So you know, you've got. You've got a lot of comforts, a lot of creature comforts. We've got a mattress instead of an inflatable mattress. We've got a real bed to sleep on inside of a large tent that you can turn around in. And you know most camping tents you're hunched over or bent over, sometimes on your knees, just dealing with your stuff. But we've got a little patio sofa in there, a little mini fridge, lights and a screen gazebo on the outside.
Speaker 4:We've got seating for you and it's lit with solar lights at night. We've got a fire pit. You know, it's just one of those astroturf carpets outside so that you don't have to drag a bunch of dirt or mulch into the tent with your shoes. So we just want um, someone who is looking for a camping experience but doesn't really have the knowledge or past experience just, they don't have everything, they don't know everything about it. They just want to get into a little bit like dipping your toes in the water, so. But you still got all those creature comforts like a fan or a heating blanket or a heater in the corner. You can use even an early spring or late fall, and you're not very far from the bathhouse either.
Speaker 4:You know, we've had lots of people come of different sorts. We've had a grandma and her kid, we've had couples of different types. We've had a couple of little kid and we've had couples of different types. We've had a couple of little kid and we've had anniversary couples come and they say, oh, we're going to come back later and, you know, do this again. And so glamping is, it's a little bit different than I guess you know. You're not staying in a big place where everything is provided for you, but you do have a little bit more than just a minimum when you go camping as well.
Speaker 2:Well, it's definitely better. Glamping is not like. My wife has visions of sleeping on the ground like digging a hole for a bathroom. It's not that, it's much more comfortable, right.
Speaker 3:We have queen-size mattresses that are memory foam, that's what you're speaking of.
Speaker 2:Very, very much an improvement over the hard, hard ground. Well, guys, if you could think of one thing you'd like our listeners to remember about hospitable homes, what would that be?
Speaker 3:well, I go back. I have to go back to the Bible. God has called us to be hospitable. That's not something you see in the, in the English translation of the Bible very often, but that's something that we want to do because we feel like God's called us to do it and we love doing it and that's what makes us different. If you, if you, if you get on our website, especially well, anywhere you're going to find people mention hey, these people were hospitable, or they'll say they were available or they answered our questions or they were quickly to pick. Because we don't do that just because we want to get good reviews. We do that because that's what we like to do.
Speaker 2:Not always, but that's what we like to do. Awesome, Awesome, Good thing to remember. So for those of us who want to check out glamping for the first time or you know, they're pro glampers and want to check out some of your beautiful locations there in East Tennessee and the Smoky Mountains, how can they learn more? Well?
Speaker 3:we have. Our main website is hospitablehomescom and then we also have linked there is Honeysuckle Springs, so that's our campground. So go to hospitablehomescom or honeysucklespringscom and you can find us. And, of course, they're available on Google to reach out to us. If you Google those, you'll find them. So we have three cabins Very good, very good, and can you book online? You can book online, you can book through our website, or you can find us on Airbnb or VRBO Hip Camp for our campsites.
Speaker 2:Very good, very good At both websites.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome. Well, john, jenny, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to spend some time with me and with our listeners and to tell us all about Honeysuckle Springs and hospitable homes and moving forward. We wish you guys and your family and your businesses all the best, moving forward, thank you Thanks so much. Absolutely. Thank you, and maybe we can have you back sometime when you've got something big going on.
Speaker 3:Oh, that'd be great.
Speaker 2:All right, thanks so much. Y'all have a great rest of the day, you too. Bye-bye.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the good neighbor podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnptry-citiescom. That's gnptry-citiescom, or call 423-719-5873.