Updated on August 12, 2025
When Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina in September 2024, April Burns couldn’t sit back and watch. She posted a call for help on social media and woke up to $4,000 in donations in her Venmo app. Within days, she had filled a donated box truck with supplies and driven it into storm-ravaged communities, setting up delivery systems with rope pulleys and shopping carts to reach those cut off from help.
Driving back from that trip, she realized she’d tapped into something bigger than a one-time relief effort.
“It really just hit me when we were driving home. I looked at my husband, and I said, ‘You know, nobody does this in the vacation rental industry,’” April recounted.
Joining forces
Since then, April has joined industry leaders Sue Jones and Rachele Hobbs to launch Hospitality Heroes, a nonprofit with a mission to prepare, protect, and support hospitality workers during disasters.
While Hurricane Helene sparked the idea, April had long felt a calling to do something more for her industry. Her background as a hospitality trainer deepened her awareness of how vulnerable frontline workers can be when a crisis hits.
Sue, an influential HR consultant in the vacation rental world, had mentored April for years. When April called to ask if she was crazy for wanting to start a nonprofit, Sue replied, “Not at all.” She had been reflecting on how she wanted to give back to the vacation rental industry as she cut back on new HR clients.
“I wanted to volunteer more, and this … felt like a really good fit, because I still get to stay within the industry and the people I love,” Sue said. “There is just such a need to assist the employees and help this industry from [an emergency preparedness and response] standpoint.”
They brought in Rachele Hobbs, a vacation rental operator and former teacher who runs Hobbs Realty on Holden Beach, North Carolina. Rachele had built a culture of care in her company, including emergency plans and employee support.
“What drew me in, in the initial stages, was the fact that we were going to care for those who care for everyone else, that make our businesses possible, and make hospitality possible,” Rachele said.
The three women met, strategized, and set a bold goal: to build a national organization that supports hospitality workers through education, planning, and on-the-ground response.
Centering on workers
Disaster response often prioritizes guests, property owners, or buildings. Hospitality Heroes will make sure that support extends to housekeepers, maintenance techs, vendors, local business employees, and others who keep short-term rentals running.
Short-term hosts support approximately 1 million jobs in the U.S., according to Airbnb. Most are small businesses without HR departments or disaster recovery teams. When disaster strikes, they make the calls, pay the bills, and calm guests, while their staff may be evacuating their homes. Hospitality Heroes aims to step in with templates, technology, and a support network from people who’ve lived through it and can make it easier for others.
“Natural disasters or disaster crises, no matter what it is, it’s going to hit everywhere. So we want to be those people that can help them prepare for it, … support them during it, and then help clean up and move on to be a successful business actor,” April said.
Strategy for resilience
Though the nonprofit’s origin story centers on a hurricane, the founders note that emergencies aren’t always weather-related. Wildfires, cyberattacks, pandemics, and building fires can bring a hospitality business to a halt.
Hospitality Heroes is launching with a focus on education, equipping property managers with practical tools to prepare their teams, starting with something as simple as knowing where employees live and how to reach them during a crisis. Much of the program comes from personal experience.
Sue has guided dozens of vacation rental companies through times of crisis.
Rachele has evacuated her barrier island 12 times for hurricanes and knows firsthand how shutdowns affect workers. When her town closed for 30 days during COVID-19, she paid every employee out of pocket, inspiring a “30-day buffer” budget line to support employees during future shutdowns.
Her team uses a color-coded emergency plan with checklists for locking down homes, redeploying staff, and managing phones. Her templates can scale to other markets, and Hospitality Heroes plans to make them accessible through its website and, eventually, a dedicated app.
That app is still in development, but the vision is ambitious: a platform combining real-time alerts, verified disaster mapping, job-swapping opportunities for displaced workers, and links to local emergency resources.
National effort with local resources
At its launch during the Vacation Rental Women’s Summit Aug. 19-21, 2025, Hospitality Heroes will begin inviting donations and partnerships. The team is seeking $250,000 to build its technology infrastructure and expand its reach. Volunteers are already signing up as regional point people or to donate supplies, and Breezeway’s Koryn Okey has stepped up as volunteer coordinator.
One innovative idea is a job-swap network. If a storm shutters operations in one market, displaced workers could pick up temporary work in another, helping communities retain workers through recovery.
Hospitality Heroes isn’t stopping with the vacation rental sector. They also want to reach ancillary services, from restaurants to vendors. They’ve designed their materials to be inclusive and accessible, with plans for train-the-trainer programs and regional workshops hosted by local organizations.
They’re also asking for help gathering links to local resources like food banks or trusted contractors, information that may be harder to find than national aid agencies.
“The vacation rental industry and the people that we know in this industry are so giving and willing,” April said. “We want to be the people that help those resources connect and help bring them together.”
For more details on donating or volunteering, visit hospitalityheroes.org.
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