As Bar Harbor and nearby towns try to adjust to ever-increasing tourist traffic, the number of monthly visits to Acadia National Park has topped 800,000 for the first time ever.
Acadia had a record number of nearly 843,000 visits last month, according to data from the National Park Service published on Friday. The estimated total breaks a record that was set just over one month ago, when the National Park Service estimated that Acadia had 797,000 visits for the month of July.
Prior to this summer, Acadia’s busiest month had been July 2021, when it had 795,000 visits. Acadia had a record number of annual visits that year, topping 4 million for the first time, and has reached annual totals of roughly 3.9 million every year since.
Tourism industry officials have attributed the increase at Acadia to a post-COVID boom in national park visitation, along with more warm and dry weather, which they say consistently draws more summer visitors to Maine.
The increase in tourist traffic to Mount Desert Island, where most of Acadia is located, and surrounding communities has resulted in many area municipalities addressing the issue head-on.
Ellsworth, which has seen a rapid expansion in its weekly vacation rental market, has embraced the industry’s growth as a chance to broaden the city’s tax base. Some business owners near the Schoodic section of the park, which gets less than 10 percent of the park’s overall visits, say they have benefited from this year’s 17 percent increase in tourist traffic on the east side of Frenchman Bay.
Other towns have sought to lessen the impact on tourism on their towns.
Bar Harbor this year has enforced voter-approved steep cuts in the amount of cruise ship passengers it welcomes ashore and put a temporary halt to lodging development, while in 2021 it set a limit on vacation rental properties. Lamoine last year banned resorts and upscale campgrounds.
Prior to 1990, when the National Park Service used a different methodology for estimating the number of visits at Acadia each year, it came up with totals in the late 1980s that are higher than counts they have calculated in recent years.
The park service changed its formula in 1990, after it concluded the prior methodology was overestimating how many people came and went, and that annual estimates before then are not accurate.
