I visited as part of the ASDSO conference that was hosted at the hotel in April, 2008.
I'll start with the positives: The room was clean, the beds were very comfortable, the daily cleaning service was sufficient.
Now the negatives: Hotel not central to anything good about Asheville, entrance hard to find and looks like you're driving up someones poorly maintained private drive, building looks like a crappy Holiday Inn with low ceilings and cramped elevators, service poor, TV signal fuzzy, funny mechanical noise would occur just outside my room every 2 minutes 24-7, Bar terrible and smokey, conference meeting space inadequate and consistently freezing, room temperature control impossible (ended up sleeping with the sliding glass door open in order to cool), the staff was very rude at checkout, they double charged my account, no response to repeated phonecalls to the manager regarding charge issue and overall experience.
This is the only time I've stayed at the Crowne Plaza Resort in Asheville. I won't be returning.