Acadia National Park just had its busiest September ever, outpacing September 2021 by 30,000 visits.
The return of large cruise ships to Bar Harbor this summer is thought to be the reason for the increase. Bar Harbor had no large cruise ship visits between November 2019 and April of this year due to the pandemic, though it did have some small cruise ship visits last year.
September and October are typically the busiest months for cruise ship visits to Bar Harbor.
Of more than 150 cruise ship visits scheduled in Bar Harbor for 2022, more than 40 visits happened in September and another 40 are expected for October. In normal years, cruise ships bring a few hundred thousand passengers to Bar Harbor each year.
Despite the lack of large cruise ships last year, the national park had its busiest year on record in 2021. After the pandemic caused tourism to plummet, reducing the number of Acadia visits from 3.4 million in 2019 to 2.6 million in 2020, Acadia had more than 4 million visits last year, its highest annual total since the park was founded in 1916.
The estimated total number of visitors to Acadia is high again this year, though it’s lagged behind visitation from a year ago. Acadia gets the vast majority of visitors each year between May and October, and monthly totals for June and August were down from 2021. It was also down from January through April of this year, though visitation to the park during colder months slows to a trickle.
Visitation estimates for May, July and September all have been higher this year than last year, with September getting the biggest jump. May visitation was up by less than 1 percent from the prior year, while July was up by a little more than 1 percent.
September visits were up 4.5 percent, from 667,000 in 2021 to 697,000 this year.
With 3.35 million total visits for the first 9 months of the year, the number of tourists to Acadia is within 2 percent of where it was for the first 9 months of 2021.
Alf Anderson, head of Bar Harbor’s Chamber of Commerce, said the park’s numbers show a jump in commercial tour bus passengers from around 10,000 in September 2021 to nearly 30,000 last month, because of the return of cruise ships to Bar Harbor. Cruise ship passengers frequently go on bus tours of the park once they come ashore.
Local tourism businesses struggled last year with chronic understaffing but, despite a continued labor shortage, were better prepared this summer, even with the added tourist traffic from cruise ships, he said.
“After going through such a challenging year in 2021, business owners better prepared themselves for 2022 and it paid off,” Anderson said. “Many employers brought seasonal staff on earlier in the year, increased the number of foreign workers they hired, and/or instituted new procedures that allowed them to operate with fewer workers.”
