Destinations Hit by Natural Disasters Need Tourists Back—but Maybe Not in the Same Way as Before
Places like Maui and Asheville, North Carolina, rebuilding after wildfires and hurricanes, are doing so with a mind to sustainable tourism
Destinations Hit by Natural Disasters Need Tourists Back—but Maybe Not in the Same Way as Before
Places like Maui and Asheville, North Carolina, rebuilding after wildfires and hurricanes, are doing so with a mind to sustainable tourism
Shoshi Parks
- History Correspondent
April 14, 2025 8:00 a.m.
People gather on Kaanapali Beach, a popular tourist destination near Lahaina, Hawaii, in August 2024.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
When wildfires engulfed the Hawaiian island of Maui’s historic downtown Lahaina in August 2023, Kohola Brewery was caught in their flames. The facility and taproom were completely destroyed, along with the core of the town’s Front Street.
It took the beer’s producers only five months to begin brewing again—this time with borrowed equipment and space at Kona Brewing Hawaii. But returning to Lahaina to rebuild was out of the question. Instead, they opened a new taproom in Wailea about 30 miles from the original, “a pivot to brick-and-mortar” that allowed them to serve food for the first time but not to resume brewing on their own, says Isaac Bancaco, vice president of operations at Kohola.
In its original form, the brewery’s taproom did business with the nearly three million tourists who visited Maui each year. Last year, that number was down by almost a quarter. The Kohola Brewery taproom and restaurant is one of many businesses ready to welcome visitors back to Maui—but are they ready to return?
Buildings smolder days after a wildfire gutted Lahaina in August 2023.
Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The planet is at a climate crossroads. Natural disasters are increasing so much in frequency and intensity that even places once believed to be insulated from the worst of what’s to come—the cool, wet Pacific Northwest, for example—are experiencing greater effects from wildfire, storms, flooding, landslides and drought.
These events devastate local communities not just as the tragedy unfolds but in its aftermath. Those with diverse economies can be somewhat nimble in their recovery. Houston, which was devastated by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, bounced back more quickly than expected because its economy was split among a wide variety of industries, including health care, aerospace, shipping, manufacturing and technology. Those sectors that couldn’t immediately resume business were balanced out by those that could.
But when a community is dependent on a single industry, rebuilding can be much harder. This is especially true when tourism is the primary—or in some cases the only—economic driver. “When the economy is very much reliant on one industry and that industry fails, it’s very vulnerable,” says Paloma Zapata, CEO of Sustainable Travel International, an organization working to help the global travel industry strengthen its climate resilience.
Heavy rains from Hurricane Helene caused record flooding and damage on September 28, 2024 in Asheville, North Carolina.
Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
Tourism destinations hit by natural disasters need visitors in order for local people and businesses to survive. But important questions underlie tourists’ return: Is restoring the tourism status quo the best future for a destination that’s been impacted by natural disaster? Would it be better for local communities and environments if a pre-disaster form of tourism never returned at all?
The answer is complicated. “Typically, a destination that relies on tourism is not going to stop relying on tourism just because of a natural disaster,” says Zapata. But natural disasters can act as a pivot point for both overdeveloped places and tourists to re-evaluate the sustainability of their behavior. Destinations dependent on tourism need visitors to return, but “there needs to be a balance between economic development, conservation, community well-being and the visitor experience,” she continues.
In the United States alone, several popular tourism destinations are in varying stages of recovery following calamitous natural disasters. In August 2023, the fifth-deadliest wildland fire in U.S. history erupted on the Hawaiian island of Maui. High winds drove the flames from the hills to the sea, destroying more than 2,200 structures in and around the historic district of Lahaina, and taking more than 100 lives. In September 2024, the Blue Ridge Mountain town of Asheville, North Carolina, suffered extreme flooding due to Hurricane Helene, which dropped around 14 inches of rain—40 percent of the city’s annual rainfall—in just three days. Mudslides and cresting rivers there destroyed around 2,300 structures. Then, this January, wildfires ripped across drought-affected brush and forestland in Los Angeles, destroying entire neighborhoods and causing an estimated $250 billion in damages.
Residents of Asheville view damage to the Arts District downtown after Hurricane Helene.
Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
These events are nothing short of catastrophic for local communities, but the way they are portrayed in the media often doesn’t fully reflect what’s happening on the ground, according to Victoria Isley, president and CEO of Explore Asheville. Disaster coverage creates “global impressions that are very difficult to combat,” she says, like the idea that local infrastructure no longer exists.
“There are many places, like downtown Asheville, that visibly look like nothing ever happened,” says Isley, six months after Helene. “The majority of our restaurants, breweries and music venues are open downtown, in South Asheville and in North Asheville. Almost all of our hotels are open. Our airport has been functional the entire time, and half of a brand-new terminal will open this summer.” Even many of the small mountain towns around Asheville that were hit hard by the storm—including Spruce Pine, for instance, which has one of the only mines on Earth for the high-purity quartz used in electronics, solar panels and the chips that power artificial intelligence—were back to work within weeks.
Still, in the months following Hurricane Helene, estimates that Asheville’s tourism industry would experience a 70 percent decline in the last quarter of 2024—a loss of more than $584 million in revenue—circulated through the news cycle. By the end of February 2025, it was actually the opposite that had occurred, with a 4 percent increase in visitors from pre-Helene numbers.
In Maui, while some of the island’s celebrity homeowners initially discouraged visitors from returning, the region was welcoming people back two months after the wildfires, says Kalani Kaʻanāʻanā, chief stewardship officer at the Hawaii Tourism Authority. Outside the core of historic Lahaina, which centered on the ocean-facing Front Street, the region today appears virtually untouched by the disaster, and “many Lahaina businesses have reopened or relocated,” Kaʻanāʻanā says.
Even so, the island has struggled to attract the same volume of visitors as it once did. The University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization predicts that Maui will have almost 400,000 fewer tourists in 2025 than the 2.97 million it received in 2022, and half a million fewer than pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
Maui will have almost 400,000 fewer tourists in 2025 than the 2.97 million it received in 2022.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
“Lower visitor numbers continue to affect local businesses and, by extension, our communities,” continues Kaʻanāʻanā. With around 80 percent of the region’s economy rooted in tourism, the slow recovery has resulted in the need for many families to relocate to other islands or the continental U.S. just to survive. The entire Maui County, which includes the island of Maui and two neighboring islands with small populations, Molokai and Lanai, employs fewer than 20,000 people in its two second-largest industries, retail trade and health care and social assistance. Recent data indicates that while Maui’s health care, construction and educational services industries are slowly growing, they remain only a small fraction of the economy overall.
While economic diversification could help to build Maui’s resilience, the reality is that “usually tourism-dependent economies are dependent to tourism because they don’t have a choice,” says CB Ramkumar, vice chair of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council.
If visitors do not return, the entire community would collapse. Ironically, because tourism is a major driver of carbon emissions and human-caused climate change, restoring high numbers of visitors could also have a similarly negative impact on the community in the long run. It’s a “dual issue,” Ramkumar says.
It’s important for destinations to give serious thought to the kind of tourism they want back following a natural disaster, says Zapata. “There’s always going to be support from governments to ‘build back better,’ but most of the cost is going to come from the [business] owners’ pockets.” It’s unfortunately true that some of the infrastructural challenges hotels and other businesses face after a disaster are due to the corners they cut to keep costs to a minimum in the first place. “It’s going to take a big effort first with infrastructure, the opportunity to build more renewable energy sources and use more innovative materials, and also [with the type of tourists] you target,” Zapata continues.
In the Caribbean, for example, restoring mangrove swamps and relocating businesses unwisely established in their footprint is likely to make a destination more ecologically resilient and better able to withstand disasters in the future. “Looking at a higher-value, lower-impact model for any destination [while simultaneously] diversifying the economy are really the keys to being able to withstand when a natural disaster comes,” says Zapata.
Even when a destination has a plan for sustainable recovery post-disaster, though, following it is not always so simple. Some places grow much faster than anticipated. In Curaçao, for example, where Zapata worked on the carrying capacity of the island’s tourism in the years following extreme flooding from 2010’s Hurricane Tomas, it took only two years for the number of visitors to arrive that they expected at the end of five years, “causing, of course, infrastructure pressure but also societal pressure” in sectors like the housing market, she says. “They have to handle their growth now or they’re going to have more problems.”
As Ramkumar puts it, “It’s like water gushing down a mountain. You’ve got to build the banks of the river so that the water doesn’t go flood the whole place and nobody wins.”
It’s a lesson in sustainability that Hawaii is taking to heart. “Maui’s approach to tourism is evolving,” says Kaʻanāʻanā. “We’re promoting and supporting programs that amplify community voices and engage visitors in cultural preservation and environmental protection, such as tree-planting initiatives and cultural education. Community input and environmental considerations will continue to shape Maui’s tourism future.”
Beachfront homes burned in Malibu, California, as wildfires caused damage and loss throughout the Los Angeles region in January 2025.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Reimagining the types of experiences available to visitors and establishing guidelines for them can also help destinations to weed out (some) of those who have little interest in respecting the places and people they visit. Increasingly, says Ramkumar, “there is a whole class of tourists who are willing to go to a place just to help others because that experience of giving is enriching in itself.”
Individual travelers have a responsibility to consider their own carbon footprint and the types of businesses and tours they are willing to invest in. If, according to Sustainable Travel International’s carbon calculator, it produces 1.01 metric tons of carbon dioxide to fly round-trip from San Francisco to Maui, each visitor adds to the island’s ecological fragility unless they also do things like offset their emissions, support carbon-neutral businesses and contribute through voluntourism. Currently, visitors to Maui can assist in restoring and preserving the island’s cultural and archaeological sites with Maui Cultural Lands or participate in cleanup events and invasive species removal with Malama Maui Nui. Those headed to Asheville can help with debris removal and rebuilding projects through All Hands and Hearts and the United Way of Asheville and Buncombe County, while Los Angeles visitors can volunteer with L.A. Works to repair homes, assemble food packages and organize clothes for survivors.
“Anywhere we go we should leave the places better than how we found them,” says Zapata.
Isley in Asheville agrees. Locals hope “visitors and travelers take to heart where they are visiting and how they are visiting,” she says. “Going from recovery to revival, the grit and the guts of Appalachia has always been there, and I think that’s just shining brighter after the storm.”
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