LEONARDTOWN — St. Mary’s County drew almost 1 million visitors in 2025, about the same as the year before. Fewer of them stayed the night, and that is the number that costs the county money.
Overnight visitors fell by almost 5% from 2024, while day trips grew 3.2%, the executive director of Visit St. Mary’s told the county’s Economic Development Commission on Oct. 21. Overall visitation slipped just under 0.3%.
She pointed to one main cause: fewer federal business travelers. “We were impacted by the reduced government travel over the last year and a half, two years,” she said, adding that St. Mary’s is not the only county seeing it.
For a county built around Naval Air Station Patuxent River and its contractors, where a new regional study warns of a security-clearance gap in defense hiring, those travelers have long filled hotel rooms on weeknights. The drop showed up in hotel tax receipts before the state’s 2025 visitor data arrived about a month ago, she said. “It didn’t come as a surprise to me when I saw the numbers.”
Why the night matters
A visitor who leaves before dark spends less. Overnight guests pay the county’s 6% accommodation tax on hotel and short-term rental stays, and they buy breakfast and another meal before heading home, the director said.
That tax is also how Visit St. Mary’s is paid. The nonprofit receives about 38% of the accommodation tax each year, she said, and reinvests it in advertising and programs. Fewer room nights means a smaller marketing budget for an agency that already runs on three staff members.
The director gave the commission several ways to measure what tourism brings in, using 2025 state data:
- Visitors: almost 1 million, similar to 2024.
- Day trips: up 3.2%.
- Overnight visitors: down almost 5%.
- Visitor spending: about $676,000 a day on average.
- Tax revenue from tourism: enough to pay 615 county public school teachers at the median salary, fewer than the year before.
Spread over a full year, $676,000 a day works out to roughly $247 million in visitor spending.
Running against the state trend
Statewide, Maryland tourism was still growing in the most recent year with published figures. The state’s 2025 report to the General Assembly on tourism counted 45.8 million visitor trips in 2024 and $21.2 billion in visitor spending, up 3.2% from 2023.
Even then, the state’s growth came from the same place as St. Mary’s: day trips rose 2.6% in 2024, while overnight trips were flat at 18.3 million. Business trips statewide edged up 1.3%, to about 8.1 million.
The director also said the county has lost some of its ability to track who comes. Visit St. Mary’s used to get detailed location data on visitors, but a change in Maryland law ended that, she said. The agency now infers some effects from spending patterns. Retail spending jumped on the weekend of the Patuxent River air show, which she said drew about 105,000 people, and the agency attributes that increase to the show.
Betting on oysters
To pull visitors back for longer stays, Visit St. Mary’s is pairing its marketing with the county Department of Economic Development on oysters.
Sydney Garner, the department’s agriculture and seafood division manager, said the effort began after a waterman on the county’s Agriculture, Seafood and Forestry Board reported a bad season early this year. The oyster trail that came out of it launched Oct. 1 on the Let’s Rally app, where diners check in at restaurants and events serving local oysters. The industry’s problem is demand, not supply, the director told the commission.
The agency also produced an in-house documentary, about 25 minutes long, following four oyster operations, from a young family running an aquaculture farm on the side to watermen still working wild harvest. Its broader “destination” ad campaign, built around budget-friendly travel, runs on streaming services and through WJLA-TV in Washington, with spots planned during the Major League Baseball playoffs. Target markets include Washington, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk.
A 10-year plan due for a refresh
The county’s Tourism and Hospitality Master Plan turns 10 soon. Released in 2016, it recommended moving tourism out of county government into a nonprofit, which led to Visit St. Mary’s. The director said a lot has changed since, including COVID-19, how people travel and travel budgets, and the agency will hire a consultant through a competitive process in the coming year to refresh the plan, not rewrite it.
The agency is also running a free tourism ambassador program for hotel, restaurant and museum workers, now with 24 participants and taking applications for a third group, and a marketing training series for small businesses with Calvert and Charles counties.
Commission members asked about the average wage in tourism jobs, which the director said she would look up, and suggested partnerships with tourism groups in Baltimore and Washington.
The tourism report came at the same meeting where the commission heard a regional workforce study warning that Southern Maryland’s defense jobs face a clearance gap and a retirement wave, another sign of how closely the county’s economy tracks federal spending. Statewide, Maryland shed 8,200 jobs in August.
