While Hurricane Florence temporarily shuttered two Wrightsville Beach landmark hotels, along with numerous vacation rentals, the hemorrhage on the town’s room occupancy tax loss has seemingly reached an end.   Closed from damages following the September storm, Shell Island Resort, 2700 N. Lumina Ave., reopened last month, and historic Blockade Runner Beach Res ...

The Wilmington region will continue to be one of the top 10 tourist destinations in the state despite Hurricane Florence, said Wit Tuttell, director of Visit North Carolina, during the Visit NC 365 Conference Tuesday in Wilmington. “We started doing research every two months, we polled visitors nationwide and asked them about it and we saw that at first there was ...

The eastern North Carolina lodging market has been performing better than the rest of the state over the past 12 months when it comes to room demand growth, revenue and average rental income per occupied room, according to officials who spoke Monday at the Visit North Carolina 365 Conference in Wilmington.  "We really have North Carolina East winning with 8.9 ...

This weekend, Pender County will undertake an ambitious first: hosting a conference of 250 people. It's the annual conference for Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail (or MST), which runs 1,179 miles in North Carolina from the Great Smoky Mountains to the Outer Banks. The trail is a sequence of footpaths, roads and waterways. In Pender County, it meanders through B ...

Despite $2 million in damage to Battleship North Carolina’s visitors center by Hurricane Florence in the fall, there is a silver lining.   The more than 35-year-old structure that greets thousands of visitors annually before they board the memorial warship, moored at 1 Battleship Road, is getting a major makeover.   “Looking on the bright side, th ...

The U.S. Navy is coming to the Port City this spring, coinciding with the N.C. Azalea Festival. Wilmington is among the 14 selected sites – including Miami and Puerto Rico – to host Navy Week 2019.   Sailors from across the U.S. will participate in the outreach program sailing into Wilmington April 1-7.   Navy Weeks are designed to give people the ...

The Southeast Tourism Society recently named the N.C. Azalea Festival one of the group’s Top 20 Events in the Southeast for April this year.   The festival, which this year falls on April 3-7, features more than 30 events attended by several hundreds of thousands, according to organizers.   Georgia-headquartered Southeast Tourism Society is a nonprofit ...

Wilmington City Council’s final Tuesday vote on short-term rentals allows whole-house rentals in residential zones with some restrictions, a compromise that received mixed reviews from locals who have been involved with the issue since the beginning. The restriction states that establishments eligible for whole-house lodging should have a separation distance of 40 ...

New funding options for the Choose Cape Fear campaign will be explored this year. The regional economic development marketing initiative, which developed around the Wells Fargo Championship golf tournament in May 2017, received public funds for campaign efforts.   Most of those funds, however, were committed through the first phase of the campaign, said Natalie Engl ...

Landing a third carrier and new flights at the Wilmington International Airport triggered unprecedented growth in passenger traffic last year.   The new additions came as the airport embarks on its $60 million expansion that will increase ILM’s ability to handle more travelers in the coming years.   Just over 934,000 passengers flew through the airport ...