BAR HARBOR, Maine — The state’s cruise ship season got underway Friday morning, when the Veendam pulled into Frenchman Bay and dropped anchor, bringing the first of approximately 160,000 cruise ship passengers expected to visit Bar Harbor this year.
Bar Harbor, the state’s busiest cruise ship port, is expecting 121 total ship visits this year from 30 different vessels ranging in size from the 184-foot long Grande Caribe to the 1,142-foot Anthem of the Seas, which alone can carry more than 4,000 passengers per voyage.
The first ship scheduled to visit Portland, the state’s second-busiest cruise ship port, is the Balmoral, which is expected to appear in Portland’s harbor on Sunday, May 8. Portland is expected to get 77 cruise ship visits and more than 106,000 total passengers between early May and the end of October.
Overall, 376 cruise ship visits carrying a projected statewide total of more than 283,000 passengers are expected to be spread out among nine Maine ports this year, according to CruiseMaine, the state’s cruise ship marketing entity. That passenger count would represent a state increase of 6 percent over the statewide cruise passenger total from 2015, CruiseMaine indicated in a prepared statement.
Neither projected ship total for Bar Harbor or Portland would be a record for those ports. Portland had 84 visits in 2015, the highest annual total for Maine’s largest city, while Bar Harbor set its highest mark with 127 visits in 2014.
The American Cruise Lines ships American Glory and Independence are expected to make more than 20 trips up the coast from Portland this year, with stops in Bar Harbor, Bath, Belfast, Boothbay Harbor, Camden and Castine.
Rockland is expected to get 33 cruise ship visits in 2016, most of them from American Cruise Lines, while Eastport is expected to get four. Blount Small Ship Adventures is scheduled to use Rockland as the starting point for two 12-day voyages on the Grande Caribe along the eastern Maine and western Nova Scotia coasts.
Cruise Lines International Association has indicated that direct spending in Maine in 2014 by cruise ship companies and passengers contributed $47 million to the state’s economy, representing an increase of $800,000 from the year before. Of that $47 million, $26 million is believed to have been spent on wages that supported an estimated 755 cruise industry related jobs in the state. Figures for 2015 are not yet available.
According to the association’s 2014 report, on average cruise ship passengers spent a little more than $120 in each port they visited. That would translate into passengers spending nearly $11.2 million in 2015 in Portland, which had a total of nearly 98,000 visitors, and $17.8 million in Bar Harbor, which had more than 146,000 passengers last year.
At that estimated per-passenger spending level, cruise ship passengers would be expected to spend a total of nearly $34 million in Maine ports this year, including more than $19 million in Bar Harbor and more than $12 million in Portland.
Cruise ship visits to Bar Harbor have increased steadily since 1990, when the town welcomed only 22 total ships.
The ship that traditionally visits Bar Harbor more than any other, the Maasdam, has been transitioned to another market this year and is not scheduled to make any stops in Maine, according to CruiseMaine. Veendam, Maasdam’s sister Holland America ship, is expected to pick up the slack with 20 visits scheduled for Bar Harbor between late April and late October.
