enlarge Jack Milton/Staff Photographer

Tourists disembark from the Bay View Lady at Chandler’s Wharf, Portland, after a cruise of Casco Bay Friday. Portland continues to be tourists’ No. 1 destination in Maine.

enlarge Jack Milton/Staff Photographer

Tourists crowd Portland’s Old Port Friday afternoon.

Newly compiled figures from 2006 show overnight trips rose 4 percent last year, to more than 10 million. That reflects a short, upward trend begun in 2005, when overnight trips shot up 12 percent, reversing a four-year slump.

An expanding economy, better advertising and promotion and the strong Canadian dollar contributed to the improvement, experts say.

The news isn't all good, however.

Day trips fell by 9 percent last year, for reasons that aren't clear but may include rising gasoline prices. And a ranking of most- visited destinations shows that the Maine coast continues to be the dominant attraction, despite efforts to lure travelers inland to lake and mountain locations.

There's also concern in the travel industry about whether the positive trends seen in 2005 and 2006 will continue in 2007, based on a peak summer season that seems to be off to a slow start.

The figures are contained in an executive summary of the annual visitor study done by Longwoods International, a Canadian research firm working for the Maine Office of Tourism. Complete data, including important benchmarks for spending on meals, lodging and other services, should be ready later this month.

Tourism generated $13.6 billion in overall sales and provided 176,600 jobs in 2004, the latest period available. Overnight trips are of interest because those travelers spend the most money, on lodging, food, shopping and other things. The average overnight guest stays roughly four days in Maine.

The preliminary Longwoods data indicate that the state's advertising and promotion efforts are bringing results, according to Patricia Eltman, Maine's new tourism director. Late last month, Eltman cited the trend when she reversed her earlier decision to seek new bids this summer for the state's multimillion-dollar tourism promotion contract. Eltman will renew the contract with New York ad agency Warren Kremer Paino for another year, starting in November.

Steve Lyons, marketing director at the tourism office, said the agency has been doing more advertising in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in addition to longstanding media buys in New York and Boston. The office then tries to track response to the ads through e-mail and other inquiries, and with its Web site.

"We market to certain destinations and those people are coming up here more," Lyons said.

Significantly, Maine's share of overnight travelers nationally and in the Northeast edged up last year, returning to 2001 levels. Travel fell after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the statistics suggest Maine has captured a growing share of the revived tourism market, according to Charles Colgan, associate director of Maine's Center for Tourism Research and Outreach.

The decline in day trips is harder to study, Colgan said, in part because the tourism office didn't compile figures for 2005. It may be that overnight trips continued to rise because gasoline prices don't prompt people to cancel vacations, Colgan said, but they think twice about driving to Maine to shop in Kittery or Freeport, for example.

"Day trips are marginal trips," Colgan said.

The executive summary also shows that Portland remained the top destination for visitors in 2006, a spot it has held since at least 2002. Maine's largest city was trailed by Kittery, Bar Harbor/Acadia National Park, Ogunquit and Freeport. This order has shifted annually, but has changed little overall since 2002.

One exception is Bar Harbor/Acadia National Park, which has slipped as a destination. That's not surprising, Colgan said. Traffic at Acadia has fallen since the 1980s, according to National Park Service statistics, down to roughly 2 million visits in 2005.

While Portland is the top destination, survey information also shows a high...