After coming off a winter of sparse snow, which cut into earnings for some businesses, a few proprietors of stores and inns have said the long stretches of rainy days during June and the high gas prices have given the summer season a sluggish start.
“With the rain, people put everything off,” Joy Smith, owner of Springer’s General Store in Waterford said Friday. “They’re not going to waste their gas money if they are not going to have good weather.”
The rainfall set records in Portland and Bangor in May and June. And rainfall throughout much of the rest of Maine was above normal. In the Portland area, the total rainfall for these two months was more than 21 inches, which is more than a foot above average, according to the National Weather Service office in Gray.
“Weather is the major factor,” Steve Lyons at the Maine Office of Tourism said Friday. “We can do all the marketing in the world, but if it’s raining, they tend not to take their vacations.”
Lyons said many of Maine’s visitors come from Boston, New York and places in between. “They have a shorter planning cycle, and if it’s raining, they say, I guess we’ll postpone it.'”
The wet, overcast days cut into business at golf courses and Oxford Plains Speedway, too.
“I can’t use that language on the phone,” said Dave Mazzeo, of the Norway Country Club, about how bad business was last month.
Mike Cloutier at the Paris Hill Country Club said he saw a 10 percent drop in golfers during June.
But since July 4, some said things appear to be picking up, as the number of sunny days has started to accumulate.
“Last weekend, the weather was perfect, a lot of people took advantage of it. We finally got a forecast for clear skies, and they flocked here in droves,” Butch Lenberg at Oxford Plains Speedway said Friday. “People are just starved for racing, and they haven’t had the opportunity to go.”
At Kedarburn Inn in Waterford, owner Margaret Gibson said the inn is having one of the roughest summers it has had in a few years. She contributed the slow season to high gas prices, for cars as well as planes. One of her regular customers said her airplane ticket from Colorado jumped by about 60 percent from last year.
“Everybody has to cut back somehow,” Gibson said. “And heating is going to be astronomical this year, I hear. They’re putting away money. They’re coming up for shorter times.”
At Two Lakes Camping Area in Oxford, owner Sandi Hunt said after a slow start, the campground now is doing well. She said the campground has a no-refund policy, too, for cancellations. And Harrison Inn owner Sheila Baxter said the inn is booked and business steady.
The rain appears at this point to have gone away. So far in July, there’s been little measurable rainfall. But the damp month followed a harsh winter season.
The Western Maine region from the months of January to April experienced a 10 percent drop in lodging sales, whereas the rest of Maine mostly recorded increased lodging sales, according to data compiled by the Maine Office of Tourism.
There are no statistics yet on the spring and early summer months, but Lyons at the tourism bureau said that so far, the rest of the state appears to be having a healthy summer season. He was basing his analysis on the number of visitors to the Maine Tourism Web site, as well as the number of people calling the businesses advertised on the site.
But all regions in Maine do not always experience tourism equally.
“Our job is to try to get people to Maine,” Lyons said. “Once they’re in the state, it’s up to the regions themselves to get tourists to go to those areas.”
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