Last weekend marked the start of another tourism season with the obvious signs: a sunny Sunday and long lines of cars at the York Turnpike tollbooths. Turnpike officials say signs point to another year of the steady traffic growth we have enjoyed over the past several summers. If Mother Nature and gas prices cooperate, we should be able to surpass the totals recorded by the Maine Office of Tourism’s Annual Report for 2014: more than 13 million trips bringing nearly 38 million visitors, who spent over $5.7 billion.

These obvious numbers – cars on the roads, bodies on the beaches and dollars in the cash registers – along with the apparently unintended consequences of Portland’s move to create its own higher minimum wage, raise the perennial question of the value of the tourism industry as a driver of the Maine economy. Yes, it brings in scads of money, but are the jobs it supports all low-wage, dead-end jobs increasingly filled by temporary immigrant labor? Can, in a word, the travel and hospitality industry be the engine of growth to help Maine escape the long-term decline of its traditional manufacturing base and the fiscal consequences of that decline that are being displayed so obviously in Augusta right now and, increasingly, in municipal elections?

I can’t pretend to answer that question in this space, but I do know that finding an answer lies in closer scrutiny of the less obvious measures of tourism, in the data that go beyond numbers of cars and trips and visitors and total spending.

The key to economic growth is productivity growth. We can’t hope to solve the fundamental demographic and fiscal challenges we face by creating more jobs. We must create more productive jobs, jobs whose value to a business commands more than minimum wages.

In tourism, this will come not from more visits but longer visits. The average length of stay for overnight visitors to Maine in 2014 was 3.3 nights. More tourism is just more people doing what they do now. More productive tourism is planning, designing and marketing activities that keep people here to do something new.

The average winter visitor stayed 3.1 nights. More productive tourism will provide reasons to stay along snowmobile and hiking trails and at ski resorts. The average stay of first-time overnight visitors is 3.6 nights. The average stay for repeat visitors is only 3.3 nights. More productive tourism is making the tourist experience sufficiently exciting and memorable that repeat visitors stay longer than first-time visitors. And the only way we can make tourism more productive is to pay its managers far more than minimum wage to use their imaginations to drive up these length-of-stay numbers.

Only by focusing on these perhaps-geeky numbers rather than solely on the length of car lines at toll booths, will we see if tourism can truly drive the Maine economy.

Charles Lawton is chief economist for Planning Decisions Inc. He can be contacted at:

clawton@planningdecisions.com