It’s been nearly a decade since a hotel was built in Henderson County, but after years of growth, 2016 could see two new ventures set up shop within the county’s borders.

The first new hotel for the county in nine years is already under construction on Underwood Road, just off Interstate 26 near the Airport Road exit in Fletcher, and another, a Holiday Inn Express, is following close behind on Upward Road in Flat Rock. Together, they’ll add nearly 200 hotel rooms.

The Wingate by Wyndham Asheville Airport will have 114 guest rooms as well as meeting space, and will feature one of Wyndham’s new design protocols for Wingate hotels, giving it a contemporary, mountain feel, complete with a fireplace in the lobby, according to Renee Rogers, who will be the hotel’s general manager.

Located at 155 Underwood Road, construction of the 56,000-square-foot hotel is well underway at the 5.58-acre site, and it is expected to be up and running in May, she said.

The new 85-room Holiday Inn Express just broke ground on Upward Road, across from the existing 65-room Holiday Inn Express, on Commercial Boulevard in Flat Rock.

The existing Holiday Inn Express will convert to a Quality Inn and Suites. The new facility will have an outdoor pool and should be open this fall.

The two new hotels are the latest hallmark of the burgeoning tourism industry in the county. In 2013, according to the state Department of Commerce, Henderson County moved from 17th to 15th out of the state’s 100 counties for tourism, and “there’s an eye on Hendersonville as a great destination,” even for international visitors, said Beth Carden, executive director of the Henderson County Tourism Development Authority.

Carden said TDA has a vision to grow tourism and seek the highest ranking possible.

In 2015 alone, visitors from more than 29 countries stopped by the Visitors Center in downtown Hendersonville and signed the guest book, thanks in part to the expanded marketing efforts of the TDA, which includes some international advertising.

Henderson County also broke its annual record for occupancy with the fiscal year ending in June 2015, even after losing around 100 rooms with the closing of the Quality Inn.

And with the end of the first quarter of the new fiscal year in the TDA’s rearview mirror, occupancy tax collection is up about $150,000 over the first quarter of the previous fiscal year, Carden said.

The TDA is keeping the pressure on, too, with new efforts to eliminate the “off-season.” Last year, instead of just one event in the first weekend of December, there were events throughout all four weeks of the month, and while the December occupancy rates haven’t been reported yet, Carden hopes to see that the tactic worked.

Without new hotels, the county couldn’t expect to keep moving up in the state’s rankings, Carden said.

But the goal is not just occupancy taxes, she noted. Tourists visiting the area spend money in more places than hotels, something the Department of Commerce looks at when ranking counties. In 2014, spending by tourists in Henderson County was $20 million higher than in 2013.

The new hotels will also increase the county’s ability to host more groups, allowing it to be more competitive with other destinations by offering more group sales. The county has a lot of cabins, cottages and houses, she said, but those are types of amenities where it’s hard to house a group.

More strides for county tourism could be on the way, too. The city of Hendersonville has partnered with the TDA, giving $27,000 toward a $52,000 study to be conducted by the North Carolina School of Government’s Development Finance Initiative to assess the feasibility of a downtown hotel. The TDA will foot the remaining $25,000 of the bill.

The study will look at the possibility of a downtown hotel with at least 100 rooms plus retail space, a 300-person conference center and adjoining city-owned parking deck.

Hendersonville Downtown Economic Development Director Lew Holloway told the Times-News in October that the ideal location for the hotel would be the current Dogwood parking lot, bordered by Church Street and Fourth and Fifth avenues, property that was once the Bowen Hotel.

City Manager John Connet said the study kicked off this week and should be done around the end of March. Then, assuming the study finds a need for a hotel downtown, the city will start looking at not only the Dogwood lot, but any other property that looks like it would be the best fit.

A downtown hotel would add an additional opportunity for people to come and enjoy Hendersonville, he said, especially people who want to enjoy the amenities of downtown and open up an opportunity to explore the rest of Henderson County.

“Hopefully this time next year, we’re recruiting hotel developers,” he said.

Another project in the works that could bring more tourists is an effort to establish the area as an American Viticultural Area, a specially designated region for wine-grape growing, with its own weather, elevation, geological characteristics and more.

At a TDA board meeting in October, Mark Williams, executive director of Agribusiness Henderson County, said the proposal was brought to him by area wineries.

The county’s two wineries contributed $5,500 each to the proposal, and the TDA contributed $7,000. The county’s wineries are visited by roughly 30,000 people each year, Williams told the TDA in October, with 75 percent of those visitors coming from out of town. With the AVA designation, that number could rise by a third.

The TDA is also working on a new product development grant program to help local businesses expand their product offerings to help drive more tourism to the area, with one of the first grants supplying money for the downtown hotel study.

“It takes a village to make it all work,” Carden said.

It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what is driving the increase in tourism, she said, though the general rebound of the economy and overall health of the area’s business climate are on the list. Recent “huge attractions” have been a boon, such as the Sierra Nevada Brewery in Mills River and the Tryon International Equestrian Center, which, she said, have been “big boosters to us.”

“We’re all in it together,” she said.