Acadia's 100th, ideal weather brought big bucks to Bar Harbor
Photo / Laurie Schreiber
Fred Link, general manager of the Bar Harbor Inn, says the inn saw a significant increase in room reservations this year, helped in part by the centennial of the National Park Service.
Photo / Laurie Schreiber
Stephanie Clement, conservation director for the Friends of Acadia, worked with businesses to help promote the National Park Service’s centennial celebration.
Photo / Laurie Schreiber
Des Bousquet, left, and Mick Majka, owners of Epi’s Pizza and the new Pork Nation, saw a steady increase in business this summer.
Acadia National Park's celebration of its 100th birthday, along with favorable weather, are two top reasons cited for a surge of visitors and business activity this past summer. Another contributing factor has been a marketing push by the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce, begun four years ago with the hiring of a publicist.
“It's been an outstanding season,” says Fred Link, general manager at the Bar Harbor Inn, one of 13 lodging properties owned by the Witham Family Partnership, one of the two largest lodging owners in Bar Harbor.
“For the Bar Harbor Inn,” says Link, “room reservations were up 4% to 5% compared with 2015. That's a significant increase for us,” as compared with the prior year increase of 1% to 2%. “I think it was combination of really positive things going on. Of course, the centennial celebration drew a lot of people coming to [Mount Desert Island] and the park. I think the perfect weather helped us out as well. And continued national exposure, both for Acadia and Bar Harbor, has done a lot as well. I think it all kind of worked together.”
First-time visitors were also key to the increase.
“I think they heard the publicity and they wanted to come and check it out,” Link says.
And more people were coming from farther afield. Most visitors to Acadia come from the Northeast. But this year, the inn had an uptick in guests coming from the West Coast and the Southeast.
Acadia has already welcomed 2.25 million visitors through the first eight months of the year, up 17% from the previous year, and is on pace to top 3 million visitors for 2016, up from 2.81 million in 2015 and 2.56 million in 2015. That would be the highest tally since 1989, when Acadia had 5.44 million visitors and the park's single-highest one month visitation in recent decades, 1.04 million people in August, according to monthly records that date to 1979.
Shopkeepers see gains
Retailers in and around Bar Harbor reported increases in sales.
“We did experience a significant increase in business,” says Dave Woodside, president of the Acadia Corp., which runs shops in Bar Harbor. “I attribute that to the centennial and all the publicity around that, but also to the excellent weather, and an all-around seemingly good mood. And certainly, in my experience, in election years people are more conservative in their expenditures and travel, and I've heard speculation that people might have been staying closer to home.”
He suggested that more people were doing driving vacations, visiting nearby national parks rather than traveling abroad — a scenario that would be bolstered by the National Park Service's centennial.
Enthusiasm for the centennial could be gauged, in part, by the amount of merchandise sold, which exceeded Woodside's expectations.
“Centennial merchandise has been much more successful than I anticipated,” he says.
Working with Artforms Inc., a Brunswick screen printer, on one type of Woodside re-ordered one centennial-themed shirt at least three times, 300 shirts per order, he says. Pins, patches, hats and the like all flew out the door. Last spring, Woodside expected to sell perhaps $25,000 worth of centennial merchandise. A final tally isn't in, but it's turned out to be in excess of $100,000.
Centennial spirit in Bar Harbor
A walk through Bar Harbor's downtown reveals centennial support from businesses that deployed promotional materials — tags, display card, window clings, and the like. The materials were created by an Acadia Centennial Task Force, a working group spearheaded by Friends of Acadia that included chambers of commerce and businesses. A portion of proceeds benefitted Acadia.
Early on, “We weren't sure what kind of response we would get from businesses,” says Friends of Acadia Conservation Director Stephanie Clement. But support was great. Clement paints a picture: “The first clue are the window clings,” she says. “Some restaurants designed products, like drinks or ice cream flavors, as their centennial product. Some stores — Windowpanes and Acadia Corp. are good examples — put together displays of centennial items.”
Many designed centennial-themed products. Sagegrass Gallery created a sea bag with the centennial logo. Hemporium and Cool As A Moose made special T-shirts. Udder Heaven whipped up an Acadia Sunrise ice cream. Atlantic Brewing Co. produced CentenniALE, using a hop that's actually called the Centennial.
“We were only going to make 50 barrels, but we made 100,” says Doug Maffucci, who owns and runs Atlantic Brewing with his wife Barbara.
“Certainly there was lots of press about Acadia and the National Park Service's centennial, and I think that generated interest,” Clement says. “But also Acadia is within a day's drive of huge populations around the Northeast, and that helps drive people to Acadia.”
Impact of cruise ships grows
Cruise ships and Cadillac sunrises — growing numbers of passengers and pre-dawn-risers, respectively — also contributed to increased business activity. The long-time Epi's Pizza and new Pork Nation, both owned by Des Bousquet and Mick Majka, saw tons of foot traffic, Bousquet says.
“Epi's is always high-volume, year after year,” Bousquet says. “This year was even stronger. At Pork Nation, we started strongly. We were a little nervous with the centennial, not knowing if we could keep up. But our business grew as steadily as we were able to keep up with it.”
By early October, there were still a lot of people in town, she says. Many are from cruise ships.
“We had two ships in the other day. That's 6,000 extra people,” she says.
Bar Harbor is Acadia's largest gateway community by far. But businesses in smaller Southwest Harbor and Tremont also promoted the centennial. In Southwest Harbor, at Hutchins Cottages at Acadia, owner Kristin Hutchins linked the theme to her a composting and recycling challenge for her guests.
“I was trying to find a way to participate in the centennial,” Hutchins says. “So for every pound my guests recycle or compost, I'm donating 50 cents to Acadia,” she says. So far, that's about 520 pounds, or $260.
Hutchins is always fully booked during the May-October season, but her sense is the town was more crowded this year. In neighboring Tremont, F.W. Thurston Co. owner Mike Radcliffe says the seasonal restaurant was packed all summer.
“We were about 20% ahead for the season and we're really busy anyway, so 20% gets to be a big number,” Radcliffe says. “Sometimes there were 50 or 60 people down the ramp and onto the pavement, waiting to get in. That happened mostly in August, but we continue to be busier in September than we ever have been before. Some people think we would have been busier this year regardless of the centennial because of lack of interest in European travel and maybe other issues. I think it's hard to say. But definitely the island in general is busier.”
Another Tremont restaurant, Seafood Ketch, saw a 3% increase in June and July business, but was flat for August and September, says Lisa Branch, who owns the long-time restaurant with her husband Stuart. They didn't see a “centennial effect.”
“I think everything was concentrated in the park,” she says. “The park held so many events that had food that people didn't need to go to restaurants.”
In general, the Seafood Ketch does benefit from Bar Harbor overflow, she says.
“We find, with the cruise ships in, that we get lots of people during the day because Bar Harbor is crazy, so people come over here.”
'Crazy' congestion remains a challenge
Acadia is working on a transportation plan to mitigate congestion, according to John Kelly, the park's public information officer. In the meantime, this summer the park refined strategies from 2015 to deal with, for example, gridlock at the top of Cadillac Mountain, a prime sightseeing spot: Once traffic to Cadillac's access road reached a certain point, rangers closed the road to allow vehicles at the top to clear out. That happened nine times between July and September, compared with five gridlocks in 2015. For now, “crazy” congestion remains a problem, Kelly says.
Matt and Kristi Losquadro, who run the Salt Air Inn in Bar Harbor, heard a lot from guests about such issues.
Bookings at the year-round inn were up about 15% year-to-date at the end of September, full through October, and filling for November. Its off-street parking has proven a draw for guests, given Bar Harbor's traffic and parking congestion.
“Very, very busy this year, more than anything we've had in the past, by quite a bit, actually,” says Matt Losquadro. “In September we had one room open for one night. That's unusual, to be 100% full for September. In the past there's been a lull in September. But they just kept coming.”
That's good for business, Losquadro says.
The drawback?
“The park has been extremely crowded. We've had more guests this year complain that there were too many people at the top of Cadillac, there was no place to park at Jordan Pond House, they couldn't get close to Sand Beach. At sunrise, there's a thousand people at the top of Cadillac. That's great for the people seeing it, but others didn't get to see it. They come back here and say, 'Well, I couldn't get up Cadillac.' We explain there's probably more people here this year because it's the centennial and because Acadia has gotten a lot more publicity in the last two years than it probably ever has before. Maybe this is the goal — to bring more people to Acadia. But I don't think Acadia is prepared for it. I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe the park should issue passes for Cadillac.”
At the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce, Executive Director Martha Searchfield projects a continued upward trend for 2017, due to media attention. Four years ago, the chamber started working with the Augusta marketing agency Nancy Marshall Communications to promote Bar Harbor and Acadia. Congestion or not, people are here because they love this area, she says. Periodically, she polls visitors.
“I was down on the cruise ship pier, talking with passengers,” she says. “Their enthusiasm — 'Oh, wow! We had no idea this much was here in Bar Harbor!' They all said they wished they had more time to spend exploring and they wanted to come back.”
During the recent Acadia Night Sky Festival, Searchfield adds, “One woman got off bus and said, 'Oh, my gosh, I went to the visitors center, they told me about this event, and I never thought in my life the sky would be as beautiful as it was on top of Cadillac.' So yes, I think we had a great year.”
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