Despite some pessimism among Bar Harbor businesses over how a sharp drop in cruise ship visits may affect their 2025 tourism season, officials in other towns are enthusiastic about getting ship visits this year.
With Bar Harbor voters having decided to sharply cut back on the number of large ships that drop anchor in Frenchman Bay, cruise companies are turning to other Maine ports as places to visit for ships travelling back and forth from Boston to eastern Canada.
Portland also is showing signs of pushback against the industry, with a group called Portland Cruise Control forming this spring to scrutinize the ships’ impact on the city.
But in Eastport, local officials and business owners are expecting to get 18 cruise ship visits this year — 12 of which will bring upwards of 1,400 passengers each — which is more visits than it has ever had. Its first visit this year was on May 9 by the 210-passenger Pearl Mist, which had been scheduled to visit Bar Harbor that day but changed its stop to Eastport instead.
“We’re going to be approaching 30,000 passengers this year,” said Chris Gardner, head of Eastport’s port authority, which manages large ships that visit the local pier or the local cargo terminal.
Except for the COVID years of 2020 and 2021, Bar Harbor has typically drawn more than 100 cruise ship visits annually in recent years, with sometimes more than one vessel in port at a time, and roughly around 200,000 cruise ship passengers. Concerns about the impact of large ships led to a citizen referendum in November 2022 that banned visits by ships that can carry 1,000 or more passengers. The restrictions were affirmed in another referendum vote last fall.
This year, more than 70 cruise ship visits are expected in Bar Harbor, but of those, more than 40 are by ships that carry roughly 200 or fewer passengers. There are 14 visits scheduled by ships that each carry roughly between 500 and 900 passengers. Only 16 visits — all of which were scheduled before the 2022 vote — are for ships that carry more than 1,000 passengers.
Gardner said Eastport will never get nearly as many cruise ship visits as Bar Harbor. Cruise ships visiting the Down East city have to tie up to the local pier because of strong tidal currents, meaning it can only host one cruise ship at a time.
But even with only maybe a couple dozen visits, Gardner said the ships are a great way to boost Eastport’s tourism business without having to build more local hotels or attracting more cars down the Route 190 causeway through the Passamaquoddy reservation at Pleasant Point. The small city’s downtown district relies on visitor foot traffic to make ends meet, but keeps its small-town feel when cruise ship passengers and other visitors leave at the end of the day, he said.
“Eastport is a tourism town, but come 5:05 p.m. you can shoot a cannon up Main Street and not hit a soul,” he said. “Cruise ships are a great fit for Eastport.”
This year Bangor, Bath, Boothbay Harbor and Bucksport all will get visits only from American Cruise Line ships, which carry roughly 100 passengers each. Besides Bar Harbor, Eastport and Portland, Rockland rounds out the ports that will be visited by larger ships that each carry between several hundred and a few thousand passengers.
Rockland is expected to get fewer visits this year than in 2024, when it had 59 visits, including nine from large vessels. This year it has 32 visits on its schedule, with seven by larger ships.
At least two Rockland merchants who cater to tourists say they welcome cruise ship visits — as long as there aren’t too many.
Lynn Archer, owner and chef at Archer’s on The Pier restaurants in Rockland, said that she gets cruise ship customers when the ships are in port. Getting a surge of them through her front door all at once can put a strain on her staff, but she thinks having an occasional ship in port for the most part has a positive effect on the city, which still caters more to full-time and part-time residents than it does to sightseeing tourists.
“We’re not a T-shirt town,” Archer said. “I think it is good overall. We welcome all people.”
Sally Levi, who last year opened a family-run ice cream stand in the backyard of her home by Rockland’s Harbor Trail, said the combination of good weather and cruise ships last fall helped her exceed her expectations for her first year in business. She had a “fantastic” August last year, she said, and then netted the same amount of money again between Sept. 1 and Halloween.
“We had exceptionally good weather last year,” Levi said.
Bar Harbor is not the only Maine cruise ship port that has shown some discomfort with large cruise ships. The pushback is part of a global trend of growing opposition to ‘overtourism,’ in which residents of heavily visited destinations stage protests against swarms of tourists that they say overburden local resources and make their communities too expensive and crowded to live in.
In Portland, which at 98 scheduled visits will surpass Bar Harbor for the first time as the state’s busiest cruise port, a group of citizens this spring founded Portland Cruise Control. The group’s purpose in part is to “mitigate the negative consequences of cruise ships,” according to the group’s website.
When the large ship Meravigila stopped in Portland without passengers in mid-May, to make some mechanical repairs, the group pressured local officials to have the ship reduce light and emission pollution it was creating while in port. The Portland group says it is proposing to ban the overboard liquid discharge of pollutants that are collected as part of a process aimed at reducing harmful vapor emissions into the atmosphere.
“We are working on communication protocols for norovirus outbreaks on cruise ships, effective reporting of complaints from excessive noise, air pollution, charter bus emissions, passenger congestion, and financial data to calculate the costs of hosting cruise ships,” the group said.
