Visits to Acadia Nationwide Park and Bar Harbor are down in contrast with a yr in the past, however that isn’t essentially a foul factor for the realm that struggled to maintain up with intense tourism final yr.
The 2021 tourism season will lengthy be remembered in Bar Harbor for the way extraordinarily busy and weird it was. Acadia bought greater than 4 hundreds of thousands visits — roughly half 1,000,000 greater than it ever had earlier than — however that was with out a single massive cruise ship dropping anchor in Frenchman Bay.
Earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic, Bar Harbor routinely had greater than 150 cruise ship visits every year between late April and early November.
This yr, the cruise ships are again and at their pre-pandemic ranges, however visitation at Acadia up to now has been down general by greater than 7 p.c, in response to the Nationwide Park Service. The variety of visits was approach down for every of the primary three months of the yr, in contrast with the identical months in 2021 — by 48, 19 and 41, p.c respectively.
Winter visitation sometimes lags far behind the hotter months, when vacationers crowd Bar Harbor’s streets between Memorial Day and Indigenous Peoples Day. In April, when hotter temperatures sometimes entice extra individuals to the park, visitation was off by 4.5 p.c from the identical month final yr. It was up by lower than 1 p.c in Could, after which was down by practically 9 p.c in June. The park’s estimated visits for July, which with August make up the 2 busiest months for Acadia, are usually not but obtainable.
With greater than 1 million whole visits from January by means of June of this yr, 2022 remains to be on tempo to be the park’s second busiest yr in its 107-year historical past.
One of many components that made 2021 so tense for tourism companies in Bar Harbor was a extreme staffing scarcity, which has been precipitated partly by an acute scarcity of reasonably priced housing on Mount Desert Island, and by the pandemic-fueled Nice Resignation, during which many individuals have merely opted to not work. This was particularly evident throughout dinner in Bar Harbor, when strains of hungry vacationers stretched out the door of many native eating places as their short-handed workers struggled to maintain up.
This yr issues are trying up at companies. Alf Anderson, govt director of the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce, mentioned Friday that the labor scarcity doesn’t appear to be as dire.
“2022 is trying like it will likely be a return to pre-pandemic visitation in Bar Harbor, or near it,” Anderson mentioned. “Staffing continues to be a problem for a lot of seasonal companies however I’ve heard from many who it’s considerably higher than final yr.”
Anderson famous that Bar Harbor’s busiest time for cruise ships is in September and October, and {that a} mixture of extra cruise ships and sustained visits by vacationers arriving by automobile might enhance Acadia’s month-to-month visitors visits nearer to the place they had been in 2021.
“The outlook for the remainder of the summer season is powerful, with lodging properties reporting advance bookings according to pre-pandemic numbers and cruise visitation returning as nicely,” he mentioned.
