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Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Blackberry Mountain: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly 7-15-25
00:05:01
In this episode, Scott Becker shares a candid review of Blackberry Mountain, praising its stunning setting and exceptional food while highlighting the steep costs and unexpected service charges that made for a mixed luxury resort experience.
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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business and the Becker Private equity podcast. Today's discussion is BlackBerry Mountain. The good, the bad, the ugly. So for those that are aware and those that are not aware, it's one of those things, if you know, you know, excuse me for that, but BlackBerry Mountain, BlackBerry Farms are these incredibly upscale resort spas in the Smoky Mountains. If you're not familiar with them, Google them, look them up. BlackBerry Mountain, BlackBerry Farms. They were founded by the Beal family. The Beal family got famously rich through this restaurant shade called Ruby Tuesday. But they've done a spectacular job with these beautiful properties called BlackBerry Mountain. BlackBerry Farms. We stayed at BlackBerry Mountain. So this is the good, most beautiful place ever. Beautiful fitness, beautiful hiking, incredible food, incredible meals. So that's the sort of good. The bad is that for going any place in the world, including in the Smoky Mountains. This was ridiculously expensive. I don't want to say on ear how expensive and how ridiculous, but incredibly expensive. Incredibly ridiculous. In fact, if you text me, I'll give you the actual cost breakdown. But it was outrageously expensive. Again, the text number for Scott Becker, founder of Becker's Healthcare, Becker business. 773-766-532-5322. So that's the bad. The good is beautiful, greatest kitchen ever, incredible food, really good service. Overall, the bad, incredibly, incredibly expensive. Now to give you a foot into the ugly. The ugly is as follows, and again, not ugly how Charles Barkley talks about San Antonio or anything of that sort. None of that ugly is this. The billing for certain services was to us unclear. And then we rang up more costs that were unexpected. And I'll give you a couple examples. We saw they charged $170 for a personal trainer. Obviously that's more than we ordinarily spend, a lot more than our typical personal trainer. But you know, we're on vacation at a resort spa vacation for the two of us. We're going to have an outing. It's going to be great. So we agree, we'll do the personal trainer for 170. And the personal trainer is terrific. So not, no knocking the personal trainer, you know, the right pace of not killing me, but making me feel like it worked out and overall great. We thought it was 170 versus personal trainer. We get the bill and they charge you, you know, for two of you, 170 apiece. We end up spending for this personal trainer who is fine, you know, a middle aged man like me, not that that should matter, but a $340 for the personal trainer. For an hour. You would have thought I'd come out of there feeling like Hercules. And again, Hercules is before a lot of your generation, but you know, a traditional strongman, but again, or superhero, the. Or I guess actually mythological creature. But I can assure you I didn't come out like Superman. But I was blown away by the 340 charge for the personal training. Literally. BlackBerry Mountain, a person for Liz and I, 340 bucks. Literally. Incredible. It is what it is. So that's sort of the ugly. The ugly to add on to that is we did something similar. We took a hike with one of their guides and we thought, oh, this is going to be terrific. There was some charge for it, you know. And again, I'm not a big hiker. I find it to be one of the most boring things in the world to do. No offense to those that are out there and love to hike. I find it incredibly boring. But so we go on the hike and again, there's some outrageous charge attached to it. And again, terrific guide. I actually thought the guy was just fantastic. But oh my goodness. Incredible charges attached to that. So here's our story on BlackBerry Mountain and BlackBerry Farms is a related property. Supposed to be fantastic too, but they're very tough on you can't go if you go to one, you can't stay at the other or have dinner at the other, etc. Etc. Beautiful, beautiful place. The restaurant's spectacular and it's, it's included in the outrageous cost. The bad, ridiculously expensive. So expensive that when you leave and get the bill on the way out, you feel like somebody took a smack and put a pan across your head. It was so expensive and I thought I had paid for a good deal of it up front, but the service charges, everything else were so incredibly strong that I felt like that was the bad. And then the ugly was feeling on a few of the services that you just hit the Johnny Rocket ripoff kit. The Johnny Rocket thing was something in my generation, but you just felt like you just got sort of hit hard like that. If the pan hit you on the head when you got the bill, this felt like it also hit you on the ass on the way out. Again, BlackBerry Farms, the good BlackBerry Mountains. The good, the bad, the ugly. Thank you for listening to the Becker Business podcast and the Becker Private Equity podcast. Thank you to our incredible producer, Chanel Bunger. Literally the best in the business. Chanel, thank you very, very much. Thank you folks.