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There’s no doubt that 2020 has been a rough year for Maine’s tourism industry, as many visitors have put travel plans on hold due to the coronavirus and restrictions put in place to slow its spread.
But there are sectors of growth that could guide future efforts to market Maine to both visitors and potential new residents.
While many hotels have been hard hit this summer, demand for long-term rentals in many areas of the state has exceeded expectations and, in some cases, even outpaced last year’s numbers.
“We’ve had bookings through the roof,” Kate Chaplin of The Knowles Company told the BDN. The company manages weekly rentals for more than 430 properties on and near Mount Desert Island. “They’ve been saying, ‘We want to go to a place where we feel safe.’ They want to go where it’s not crowded.”
Inquiries have quadrupled since early July, Chaplin said. The agency’s clients are people who want to get away from big cities and surrounding suburbs and have more room where they can get outside and relax without worrying about being in crowded places, she said.
Data from vacation rental service Airbnb shows that hosts in northern Maine saw a 102 percent increase in guests from nearby states in June over the same month in 2019, and those in western Maine saw a 49 percent increase.
One of Maine’s summer visitors was writer Walter Nicklin, who spent two weeks at Pemaquid Point, which he described in a Washington Post column titled “In coastal Maine, the perfect pace for self quarantining.”
“With invisible agents of death lurking all about, you don’t need the thrill of adventure travel to sharpen the senses,” he wrote. “Just softly swaying in my Adirondack rocker while gazing at the undulating sea outside the window seems, counterintuitively, as consciousness-raising as my long-ago attempt to summit Mont Blanc. There’s renewed appreciation for what I have in being alive — and what could be lost.”
Visitors like Nicklin are no replacement for short-term visitors, nor a panacea for all of Maine’s tourism industry, but this model plays to Maine’s strengths.
In fact, it isn’t new at all. It harkens back to the early days of Maine tourism when “rusticators” came to the state to escape the heat and sometimes unhealthy conditions of East Coast cities.
“They came to Maine by stage coach or cargo schooner to enjoy the country life style and healthy air of the Maine coast,” the Penobscot Marine Museum explains on its website. “Artists discovered the scenic beauty of the Maine coast in the mid-19th century, and their paintings advertised Maine to wealthy clients in Boston and New York.”
There appears to again be a growing demand for the essence of Maine, or at least one version of it. Visitors are increasingly looking for places that allow separation from others, such as camps and cottages. There is an emphasis on outdoor activities, such as hiking, boating and biking, that lend themselves to physical distance. Visitors are seeking take-out meals and delivery of groceries.
And, there is heightened demand for internet connectivity, as many visitors plan to stay in Maine into the fall as they continue to work remotely. If you can work away from an office, Maine can be an increasingly attractive place to visit and to live.
Maine’s tourism industry needs more than longer stays from well-heeled travelers to make up for the coronavirus-related downturn. But there is value in recognizing — and marketing — Maine’s centuries-old appeal as a place of refuge and personal restoration.
