Maine tourism season looking solid as summer heats up

“We’re holding steady like last year,” said Julie Roberts, co-owner of Coastal Maine Popcorn in Boothbay Harbor. “There are a lot of people around. We’re feeling good about things.”

Every weekend in May produced rain along the coast, and some weekends in June followed suit. July has seen little to no rain so far, with predominantly sunny skies for the busy Fourth of July weekend, when Maine’s summer tourism season typically ratchets up to full speed.

While the early-season rain might have put a damper on some weekend traffic, some businesses nonetheless did well. Sherman’s Maine Coast Book Shops, which has 10 locations scattered from Bar Harbor to Saco, has seen sales up across the board, according to co-owner and CEO Jeff Curtis.

“We’re having a really good summer so far,” Curtis said, adding that sales at each of their locations have been up between 5 and 10 percent over last year.  

Sherman’s operates its stores year-round, but like any retail business in coastal Maine, sees its sales swell in the summer. The Maine chain has 70 people on staff year-round company-wide, and adds maybe 20 or so positions in the summer to help with the higher volume, according to Maria Boord Curtis, Sherman’s director of operations.

Housing has become a bigger issue for Sherman’s employees in recent years, but the company doesn’t have the resources of a large hotel or restaurant that might help finance employee housing, Jeff Curtis said. But because Sherman’s stores employ mostly year-round staff, the bookstore chain sees less impact from the coast-wide affordable housing crunch.

Curtis said there is uncertainty in every summer, ranging from the impacts of weather to general concerns about the economy. But he said the economy still seems strong — despite concerns about how President Trump’s immigration and trade policies might affect international travel or the cost of goods.

The relative lack of cruise ships in Bar Harbor this year might be noticeable this fall, which traditionally has been Bar Harbor’s busiest cruise ship season, but those passengers comprise only 5 percent of their sales in Bar Harbor, he said.

“I think we will be fine,” Curtis said. “I’m confident the rest of the summer will be good.”

Other businesses had a rougher spring. Julia Cooper, who owns and operates Safe Harbor takeout stand on the Castine town pier, said rainy weekends in May were a problem. She opened in early May but has no indoor seating and, because her sales were so slow, staff she had lined up for the summer ended up taking jobs elsewhere instead.

“The first two months were very dead,” Cooper said. “I didn’t have the hours to give employees, but we’re a lot busier now.”

Cooper said she has managed to get some help from friends and family, but still is looking to hire a full-time cook. That and some higher food costs — though, unlike eggs and crabmeat, lobster prices have not increased — are her biggest current challenges, she said.

“It worries me a little bit,” Cooper said.

Some midcoast business owners say they have noticed differences from last summer.

Roberts said the cost of plastic bags she uses to package popcorn that she sells off the shelves of her Townsend Avenue store in Boothbay Harbor has risen since last fall  — perhaps because of tariffs the Trump administration has imposed on China, where the bags are made.

But her costs for those same bags dropped sharply last year when she realized she could buy them straight from the manufacturer, instead of through a supplier, she said.

Compared to what she was paying for those bags last year, “we are definitely still ahead,” Roberts said.

A little further east up the coast in Rockland, Sally Levi said a short-term vacation rental she and her husband have operated the past three years has fewer bookings so far this season. The seasonal cabin had a 99 percent occupancy rate last summer, she estimated, but so far this year it has been booked maybe 75 percent of the time.

Levi said she wasn’t sure why this is the case, but she has heard from other local vacation rental owners that fewer visitors from Canada have come to Rockland this summer, which may be resulting in fewer bookings for everyone.

But business at Newty’s, her waterfront ice cream stand, has been great the past few weeks, she said. It was closed a lot in May because of the rain but, aside from the last weekend of June, the weather has largely cooperated since then.

“The Fourth of July was fantastic, and our second busiest day was yesterday,” Levi said, referring to Saturday.

Stephen Coston, a hotelier in Bar Harbor, said his business also has picked up as the weather has improved.

Coston and his partners manage about 400 hotel rooms among a dozen different properties in town, including the Pathmaker Inn on Cottage Street, which just opened this spring. He said that despite May being “a bummer,” the new 45-room hotel has had brisk business. It sold out over the July 4 weekend, and its bookings are filling up through August.

Coston said the spring and fall shoulder seasons in Bar Harbor tend to attract visitors who live within a day’s drive and make plans at the last minute, as opposed to summer visitors who often make their reservations months in advance. Despite anxieties over the economy, he expects this year to mirror other recent tourism seasons, which have drawn roughly 4 million people to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park every year since 2020.

“It’s been like a re-run of the past few years,” Coston said of the town’s tourism business since Memorial Day. “And the fall is looking good.”