As August makes way to September and the Vineyard readies its goodbye to summer, businesses are reporting mixed results even though preliminary data show more traffic on roads, runways and ferries.
Several business owners said the robust years during the pandemic have settled back down, setting new expectations.
“It was a good season,” said Mark Snider, the owner of the Winnetu Oceanside Resort in Edgartown. “But it’s more pre-Covid.”
Erica Ashton, the new executive director of the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber of Commerce, said she has heard some businesses have had incredible years, while others have seen slightly lower sales.
“It depends on who you speak to,” she said.
There were some concerns at the start of the season when vacation rental companies reported higher rates of vacancies. Some theorized the higher number of openings was due to sky high rental prices and increased supply.
“There’s definitely some unbooked availability,” Wendy Harman, with Point B Realty, said at the end of July. “The goal is getting occupancy up. Heads in beds are the people that eat in the restaurants and in the shops.”
Julia Tarka at Rosewater said people were concerned about the lower occupancy rates, but July at her Edgartown cafe was brisk.
JB Blau, the owner of the Loft, Chowder Company and Sharky’s Cantina, gave a “cautious thumbs up” to the season.
“It’s been solid, no complaints,” he said. “I don’t think the whole season is going to break any records.”
Whatever businesses saw this year, it wasn’t due to fewer people coming to the Island this summer. Reports from the Steamship Authority, Martha’s Vineyard Airport and vehicle traffic counters were uniform, with each one registering slight upticks compared to 2023.
Full traffic figures for August will not be available until next month at the earliest, but the Steamship Authority reported carrying more than 300,000 passengers in June on the Vineyard route, a 6.5 per cent increase over last year.
The first three weeks of July, the dataset that was readily available, had about 224,000 passengers, about 1.2 per cent more than the same time period last year.
The airport, which set a record high for passengers in 2023, could be on pace for a new record. Overall, the first seven months had about 41,000 commercial passengers, about 3,000 ahead of the first seven months of 2023.
June and July were also both up, by a combined 3,000 passengers.
“It’s nothing drastic,” airport director Geoff Freeman said late last month. “It’s fairly on par with last year’s operations.”
Vehicle traffic counters around the Island in June and July also saw slightly higher daily rates than last year.
Near the intersection of Barnes Road and Edgartown West Tisbury Road in Edgartown — an area that has become one of the busiest stretches of roads on the Island — the annual average daily traffic for July 2024 was 14,238 vehicles — 166 more vehicles than the year before.
Only one of four counters that collected data over the last two summers saw a decrease in either June or July, but the drop was minimal. On Edgartown-West Tisbury Road near Meshacket Road, about 10 fewer cars on average drove by in July 2024 than July 2023.
On the water, Oak Bluffs harbor master Emily DeBettencourt confirmed the mixed sentiment of business owners.
During one weekend in July, she had to turn boaters away from the harbor for a lack of space — the first time that’s happened in two years. But other days never came close to those peaks.
“It was kind of inconsistent,” she said. “We had some super slow days...but we also had some almost record-breaking days.”
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