Maine’s hotels, restaurants, resorts and other hospitality businesses have been moving aggressively to fill their staffing needs for the busy tourism season ahead.
It takes tens of thousands of workers to cater to the nearly 10 million visitors who will spend billions of dollars during Maine’s summer and fall tourist seasons. To fill those jobs, businesses do anything and everything they can.
They’ve advertised their jobs early, boosted wages and benefits, offered housing and hired immigrants who live in Maine full-time. They’re bringing in workers from abroad under the federal H-2B and J1 visa programs, and even taken on workers recently released from prison or in recovery.
And they’re keeping their fingers crossed that the federal immigration enforcement crackdown earlier this year doesn’t scare away legal immigrants who are needed to fill vital positions.
Cornelius “Connie” Russell, the long-time general manager at the Samoset Resort in Rockport, said it’s become increasingly difficult in recent years to find enough people to fill the 150 to 200 seasonal jobs he has. When you run a 182-room resort with several restaurants and an 18-hole oceanside golf course, you need a lot of employees in housekeeping, in the kitchens, as groundskeepers and behind the front desk.
“We’re competing against everybody else in the Midcoast, so it’s hard,” Russell says. “But in the end, it’s more about getting people to interview, share our culture and take them on a tour, and that usually works. We’re just trying to them here first and foremost.”
Economic driver
Tourism is the state’s largest industry and a massive economic driver. Maine had about 10 million visitors during the 2025 summer and fall tourist seasons, from May to November. Visitors spent an estimated $6.8 billion, according to the Maine Office of Tourism.
Businesses develop their own hiring approaches that work for them, and many rely on workers who hold H-2B or J1 visas. The H-B visa program allows U.S. employers to bring foreign workers to the U.S. to fill temporary nonagricultural jobs. The J1 program is aimed primarily at students from abroad to take part in work- and study-based programs.
The Samoset, for one, expects to have 46 H-2B and J1 visa holders on its payroll this year, and it offers perks such as free meals and complimentary access to its fitness center and golf course to attract workers.
Luke’s Lobster was aiming to hire 32 H-2B visa holders to work as line cooks at its Luke’s Lobster and Dry Dock restaurants in Portland this summer, says Morgan Kamensky, who is at the front lines of the restaurants’ hiring efforts.
Luke’s has about 350 year-round employees at its 27 eateries across the country, a number that swells to about 600 during the peak summer and fall months. Seating capacity at those restaurants more than doubles during the summer with outdoor seating.
In recent years, Luke’s Lobster has partnered with Saddleback Mountain ski resort in Rangeley, allowing for H-2B visa holders to work at Saddleback during the ski season and at Luke’s Lobster in the summer and fall.
The federal government this year issued the same number of H-2B visas as in recent years, but there’s always a lot of paperwork, expense and uncertainty for employers when petitioning to be allotted the visas.
“We sort of hold our breath every year and say what are the numbers, what’s happening with this program, how’s our lottery assignment?” Kamensky says. “We’ve been very lucky, knock on wood and cross our fingers. Every year we’ve gotten the visas we need.”
Seasonal needs
The Nonantum Resort in Kennebunkport doesn’t hire foreign workers with visas, but it still uses creative approaches to hiring. The resort has about 30 full-time employees, but has about 200 workers when it’s open from May through December.
In 2019, the Nonantum created its Raising People Up program to hire people recently released from prison or on work-release, people in recovery, new Mainers and people with disabilities, says Jean Ginn Marvin, who heads the family-owned business.
Last year, the inn sent a van every day to the Southern Maine Women’s Reentry Center in Windham to pick up women on work-release for jobs at the Nonantum. Besides helping with employment, the Nonantum helps them get ID cards, phones, bank accounts and clothing.
The inn also hires workers from a community of Angolan immigrants who are in the United States legally and live in Sanford. So far, Marvin hasn’t seen any indications that they would hesitate to return to the Nonantum for the summer because of immigration enforcement concerns.
Most of all, Marvin said her best recruitment tool is the Nonantum’s culture of employee appreciation that brings workers back year after year.
“The upshot of it is that each season 90-odd percent of our people come back,” she says. “That’s a crazy number in this industry. Most places are like half.”
The shoulder seasons
Getting through the summer is one thing, but having enough staff to make it through the busy fall months is another.
Staffing at the Bay View Collection hotels in Camden and Rockport typically go up about 40 percent during the peak season of June to October, says Erick Anderson, area general manager for the Bay View Collection-Camden. Anderson is in charge of the Lord Camden Inn, the Grand Harbor Inn and the 16 Bay View Hotel in Camden, which are open year-round.
The hotels fill many of their seasonal jobs with college and high school students and teachers who live in the area, offering them set schedules and discounts at restaurants, hotels and the Maine Sport Outfitters retail outlets owned by the hotels’ parent company. But students and teachers typically return to school come late August or September, putting pressure on the hotels to make sure positions are filled for the busy fall season.
One way to help is hiring students with J1 visas from Bosnia, Romania and elsewhere in eastern Europe. The hotels have “fine-tuned” their hiring model through the years, Anderson said, but they are always in the hiring mode.
“The fall,” he says, “is always going to be the most difficult season.”
‘Contingency planning’
Hiring for seasonal positions is often a crapshoot, with businesses seeking new ways to attract employees. Patrick Woodcock, president and CEO of the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, said the takeaway he gets from speaking to businesses is that they are “constantly contingency planning.”
Following the immigration enforcement crackdown earlier this year, there are concerns about whether immigrants with work authorizations will be able to easily renew their authorizations to maintain their work status.
“We saw during the elevated enforcement a lot of workers stay home, regardless of their immigration status; there was a lot of fear and uncertainty,” Woodcock says. “It remains to be seen if that shows persistence. I think the bigger long-term challenge is whether those workers actually lose their work authorizations.”
