In celebration of National Travel and Tourism Week, the Haywood County Tourism Development Authority invites the public to an open house event on Thursday, May 8, from 3 to 6 p.m., at the Haywood County Visitor Center, located at 91 North Lakeshore Drive in Lake Junaluska. 

Holiday shoppers across the region, the state, the country and even the world can give the gift of Haywood by visiting gifthaywood.com — an innovative new program helping local small businesses recover from Hurricane Helene. 

Tourism remains a critically important component of Western North Carolina’s economy. To ensure it remains strong well into the future, the Haywood County Tourism Development Authority is fine-tuning a forthcoming destination master plan that focuses on underutilized assets and what visitors seem to really want — authenticity. 

Have your say in the future of the county’s tourism industry by attending a community input session for the Haywood County Tourism Development Authority’s forthcoming destination master plan.

A visually stunning amalgamation of images — both historic and aspirational — now adorns Waynesville’s Pigeon Community Multicultural Development center, breathing new life into an old neighborhood and commemorating the important role of the structure in regional Black history. 

The Haywood County Tourism Development Authority announced last week that it had awarded just over $250,000 in grants to 18 organizations for more than two dozen community projects all across the county. 

It’s been a little under a year since Corrina Ruffieux took over for longtime Haywood County Tourism Development Authority Executive Director Lynn Collins, but Ruffieux’s wasted little time bolstering the TDA’s destination marketing strategy with robust and insightful data meant to show the county’s relative strengths and weaknesses while also hedging against uncertainty with new initiatives designed to keep the money flowing into Western North Carolina’s tourism-based economy — especially in post-mill Canton. 

As the Coronavirus Pandemic continues to spread, Haywood County and all four of its municipalities will now prohibit non-essential activity through April 16.

The fiscal year for Haywood County’s Tourism Development Authority ended June 30, and now that all the data are in, it looks like 2017-18 was another banner year for overnight stays around the county.