Asheville Reboot

Rebuilding Asheville’s Tourism: How Romantic Asheville Weathered the Storm

• Brian Hamrick • Season 1 • Episode 9

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In this episode of Asheville Reboot, Alex Jarbo talks with Justin Belleme, co-owner and CEO of Romantic Asheville
— the region’s locally owned romantic travel guide to Asheville and Western North Carolina.

Justin shares his journey from building websites as a teenager to founding JB Media Group, one of Asheville’s leading digital agencies, and ultimately acquiring Romantic Asheville — a platform that has become an essential hub for visitors exploring the Blue Ridge Mountains, local attractions, and small businesses.

They discuss:

  • How Romantic Asheville has supported local tourism recovery after Hurricane Helene
  • The balance between paid and organic search in today’s AI-driven marketing landscape
  • How Justin uses tools like ChatGPT and Claude to refresh content and improve SEO
  • The challenges and opportunities facing Western North Carolina’s hospitality industry
  • What the future of tourism looks like as Asheville continues to rebuild

💡 About Romantic Asheville:
RomanticAsheville.com
is an independent, locally owned online travel guide dedicated to showcasing Asheville and the Blue Ridge Mountains. It helps millions of visitors discover where to stay, eat, hike, and explore — from romantic getaways and outdoor adventures to local events, festivals, and hidden gems across Western North Carolina.

🔗 Connect with Romantic Asheville:

Website: RomanticAsheville.com

Instagram & Facebook: @RomanticAsheville

🎧 Watch and Subscribe:
YouTube: Asheville Reboot

🌄 Connect & Learn More

🏡 Engadine Inn & Cabins
Website: www.EngadineInnAndCabins.com

Instagram: @engadineinnandcabins

Facebook: facebook.com/EngadineInnandCabins

YouTube: @EngadineInnAndCabins

🎧 Asheville Reboot Podcast
YouTube: @AshevilleReboot

Substack: ashevillereboot.substack.com

Alex:

Welcome to another episode of Asheville Reboot. Today we have Justin from Romantic Asheville, one of the co-owners. How you doing, man? Doing pretty well. Thanks for having me. So if we wanna just go right into it and talk about your background. We've been wanting to work with romantic Asheville ever since we purchased the property here at Engadine. So if you just wanna start first with your background and then how you came to end up owning romantic Asheville and what you guys turned it into.

Justin:

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I was born and raised in this area. I spent most of my childhood in Saluda. Started working in hospitality. I worked at the Orchard Inn. Which is historic property. Kinda similar to your property here actually, yeah. Worked in the dish room there, and then I went to college and studied computer science and while I was in high school and college, I started building websites. And at that time my parents actually started a hospitality business. It's actually a holistic conference on a cruise ship. No way. So I did the original website for that. and then I started a website around 2003, called Asheville now.com. it was a competitor to romantic Asheville that started around the same time. And I gave it a good six years running, trying to run that business while also starting to build a marketing consultancy on the side. when I sort of wound down Asheville, now I set my sights on eventually acquiring Romantic Asheville. And I built an agency called JB Media Group. for a while we were one of the premier digital agencies in Asheville. We grew up to about 15 employees at our peak and did a lot of work with tourism and hospitality in this area. We were the market agency for Tupelo Honey when they started franchising around 2013. we did work for the Grove Park Inn. And some other tourism, d os around the area.

Alex:

Yeah.

Justin:

And then we branched out and focused on social impact and non-profit work nationally

Alex:

really.

Justin:

And then during that time I became aware that Romantic Asheville was for sale. used the team I had and our experience and my previous experience running a competitor to put together a deal to purchase the business, lined up a SBA loan and bought the business, and I've been running it ever since. I ended up winding down and selling my agency, actually right before Hurricane Helene hit. 20, like the middle of, 2024.

Alex:

You said it was a merger?

Justin:

Yeah, it was a Acquihire merger. What was left of the business found as many jobs for most of my team, including myself with an acquiring agency. They were actually a tourism and nonprofit focused marketing firm. It was about twice our size. Out of St. Petersburg, Florida. The timing was crazy. Like Hurricane Helene hit us right when we were doing the merger and then a week later, hurricane Milton hit their headquarters head on

Alex:

cut to post COVID. September 27th, 2024. Where were you at when Hurricane Helene hit?

Justin:

I was actually in my girlfriend's house in East Asheville. I had scheduled that entire day on Friday, to work on the merger. Yeah. Like to prepare the emails to my clients and prepare messaging around the merger. We lost power the night before and never got it back for like 20 days at that house. yeah. I mean, my office in West Asheville actually had power back within a couple days and we started working again by the middle of the week, but, it was crazy. When did

Alex:

you close that merger

Justin:

almost a little less than a month before the storm. Early September.

Alex:

What did your life look like a month after the hurricane?

Justin:

the house I was spending most of my time was my girlfriend's place, but it had some damage. So she was preparing to move out while she was getting the quotes and everything lined up for repairs. my daughter and my ex-wife went to, new England for a few weeks and I was trying to figure out when they were coming back. Yeah, I was in a brand new job, heading up search engine marketing for the company that purchased my agency. So I was trying to get my feet under me with my new role and also romantic Asheville. I mean, we basically gave every customer between one and six months of free advertising, based on how impacted they were by the storm. Yeah.

Alex:

So cutting to six months after, what did your life in the business look like after the hurricane?

Justin:

Well, six months after. I guess that would be like March of this year. So thereabouts. I was, fully in my new role as director of search marketing for about a 30 person firm out of Florida. working halftime in that role and halftime as the CEO of romantic Asheville and just trying to understand. The recovery and how it was impacting the tourism economy in our region. a few months after that, I, I stepped into a full-time role at Romantic Ashville, which I've been in for about two months. And now I head up sales and lead the content strategy for the site as well.

Alex:

What does the business look like now?

Justin:

Well, we've been really grateful that since we are the only independent, locally owned regional tourism website. We had a lot of customer loyalty. We've been really grateful that a lot of our customers have stuck with us even as. The economy, tourism economy has been hit by the storm and is still recovering. Most of our customers have stayed with us. Obviously some who were more directly impacted have shut down or, left the website, but our business is in a really good position and I'm excited to be with it full time.

Alex:

What do you see a year to three years out for one year business, but also this entire area? Like what do you see the future of this area being

Justin:

Well, I mean. you can't, you never can predict things like COVID or a storm of that nature. But, I think overall the area's in for a lot more growth. I mean, in two years the airport's gonna open a whole new section where they just opened the new one. It's gonna be more than twice as large. It's gonna think of 20, over 20, gates, and then 26 will eventually be completed from there to downtown Asheville. And further north. So I think when that stuff is all completed. The access to Asheville will be much greater, and I think that the tourism in the region will be at all time high.

Alex:

Do you have any metrics on the marketing side for growth when it comes to a year to three years out,

Justin:

It's hard to predict. I mean, even the consultants that the largest tourism organizations hired, like I think that they expected things to be recovering faster than they have. But I think that's typically the case you can typically do less than you think you can in one year and more than you think you can in 10. And so I believe, the area will rebound significantly, but I don't really have any inside data or anything from

Alex:

Yeah. From our side, we saw a big jump right after the one year of the hurricane. What do you see the future of your business being like in one to three years or at least your goals?

Justin:

I want to continue to grow it. that's a combination of expanding the way we cover the area and adding new pages. We were just talking about adding a page for skeet shooting to help cover what you guys offer here. We're always looking to expand and add new things. With, the last six months, one of the things I was doing was studying the way AI was impacting search engine marketing. I've been doing search engine marketing for 25 years. And so we've been refreshing our content and it's been bouncing back up and higher in the search engines.

Alex:

Remind me what the search engine optimization is called for the ai?

Justin:

a EO is one of the, there's multiple acronyms that have come into trend, but yeah, it's basically understanding both how to show up in the AI summaries. within the search tools as well as, typically Google has their own AI summary at the top. You wanna be cited there, but you also want to remain the top position below that for people who are still using the organic results too. So it's really gotten more and more complicated the last few years.

Alex:

Is paid search still important?

Justin:

I think so, Yeah. In some ways it's become as important as ever.

Alex:

Yeah.

Justin:

Google understands, which searches Have an intent to click on an ad and which ones don't, and the ones that don't, they try to give you the answer In ai and the ones that do have a click intent, they actually don't show the AI summary. They just show a lot of ads. It's a really strategic thing on their part to try to get more ad clicks faster. It's hard to even keep up. Nevermind. Think ahead. Yeah. but we're trying to refresh. We're using AI to compare my own content to the content that shows up highest in the ai. So I put forth a query take this page and compare it to these four pages, and give me a writer's guide to how to improve it and look for the gap. Like, what are we missing? Where can we be better? And then we rewrite the page.

Alex:

what, AI do you like to use the most?

Justin:

we're going back and forth between Claude and Chat. GPT. I don't like chat GPT five, though. It seems to be downgrade for four that just came out, right? Pretty recently. Yeah.

Alex:

Justin, I really appreciate your time here. Where can people find you at? Where can people find all the different businesses that you work on?

Justin:

I'm not as public as I used to be When I owned a couple of agencies. But right now I am the CEO and head of Sales for Romantic Asheville. And you can find romantic asheville at romanticasheville.com or by the same name on Instagram and Facebook are our two primary channels. but if you wanna find me personally, you could reach me with my old email address, which is justin@jbmediagroupllc.com. and that's where I check my communications every day.

Alex:

Awesome. Appreciate you, man. Thank you.