Salem ups price of tour guide license by 3500% following surge in visitors. Business owners say it might spell doom for ‘mom-and-pops’.

André Salkin, July 9 2024

SALEM, MA — Tucked away on a quiet street lies a door leading into a dimly-lit room with a sign reading: “THE CHAMBERS OF TERROR.”

Inside behind a curtained booth sits Ed Gannon, owner and sole tour guide of The Chambers of Terror, one of Salem's smallest tour companies. He says the recently enacted changes Salem, like the increase of annual tour guide licensing from $10 to $350, are only going to hurt local businesses like his.

“It's like when you move to the North Pole and say, ‘Hey, can we get rid of Santa?’ That's not how that works,” he said.

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Salem’s City Council has enacted plans to tax and restrict the city’s guided walking tours after complaints by some locals following the post-COVID boom in tourism and a rise in witch-related movies and shows. While many agreed the prior fee of ten dollars was too low, business owners said they had little say in the plans initially proposed in 2022, and that only the smallest local businesses will be impacted. But Mayor Pangallo said changes were long overdue.

“We have to be fully self-reflective that people are going to come to Salem. We want them to come to Salem. But, it can also be true at the same time that tourism has impacts,” said Mayor Pangallo, who served as previous Mayor Kim Driscoll’s Chief of Staff and took her place when she was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts last year.

The tax, he said, would have a negligible impact on businesses, collecting “a quarter of one percent” of the “$31.2 million” brought in annually by Salem’s tourism sector.

The city aims to use those funds (about $80,000 annually, given the price and average number of yearly licenses) to employ an enforcement officer, “to ensure tour companies aren’t violating existing city ordinance,” something which has become the “biggest concern for the city’s stakeholders” in the last few years, according to Mayor Pangallo.

Among the violations included tour guides with fake licenses, tours meeting at city property like graveyards, as well as the general nuisances of tourism and congestion which the government attributes to the walking tours.

“We were basically becoming the scapegoat of every issue in Salem,” said Lara Fury, co-owner of Black Cat Tours and one of the founders of the Salem Tour Association, an organization representing many of Salem’s walking tour companies.

While Fury agreed with Pangallo that the price raise likely won’t push out any businesses, she disagreed with the ordinance’s targets and solutions, calling the proposed enforcement officer ‘reactive’ and ‘ineffective’ compared to prior proposals like the police-sponsored safety briefing for tour guides – which was scrapped due to “budget concerns.”

It’s the large ‘out-of-town’ tour companies like ‘U.S. Ghost Adventures’, and ‘Ghost City Tours’, who have been violating the ordinances in the past, said Fury, and it’s those same businesses which can easily pay the raise in licensing fee. 

“They're not the ones that are going to get cut out by this,” said Ed Gannon, “They have a big company with deep pockets that'll just throw 300 bucks at it. Whereas for someone who has fewer guides, that's going to be a big hit.” 

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The changes to the prior ordinance from 2006 were first proposed in a last-minute announced meeting held back in December 2022, held just two days before Christmas and scheduled on short notice, according to business owners.

“It’s just a huge, you know, huge insult to us that, A, we're not going to tell you that we're proposing these things that are going to change your organization massively without your input. And that they would do it at a time when none of us,  you know,  you know, theoretically could be there.”

“Well, instead. We all went,” said Fury. “Basically everybody dropped their plans and it was a packed house.” Local business owners showed up in droves to voice feedback. Even the head of Salem’s Chamber of Commerce called the meeting an ‘insult,’ according to multiple sources.

Despite that pushback, the proposals underwent few changes from the 2022 draft except for the further raising of the annual fee from an initial $50 to $350.

‘It felt like they had already made up their minds,’ said Sarah Frankie-Carter, owner of Tours for Touring Tourists and the ‘witch-shop’ Stardust.

“The ordinance is going to put a big ding in my company,” which Carter said employs ten to twelve seasonal guides yearly.“To the point where I'm like, is it even worth it to continue doing this if I didn't have a passion for history? If it wasn't my family's history?”

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Mayor Pangallo says he welcomes tourism in the city and even hopes the law can encourage tourists to explore other parts of Salem’s history, “We have a lot of exciting stories to tell about history and architecture, literature, our seafaring history – and of course witch trials are important for American jurisprudence,” he said.

But, businesses say, many walking tour companies do tell those stories, but they just aren’t the focus of why people come to Salem. “I really wanted to just do maritime history,” said Lara Fury. “I'm a maritime historian – but people weren't interested at all. It was very disheartening.”and we found that doing the ghost tours was a really great way to get people hooked. ‘Oh, we're gonna go see ghosts,’ and then – it’s kind of a sneaky thing – you're really learning history.”

Other owners blamed the council for, in their view, representing wealthy developers and landowners more than local tour companies, some citing Council President Ty Hapworth’s ownership of an AirBnB in the top 1% of rentals worldwide, according to AirBnB.

While businesses are split on the impact of the changes, Fury and other business owners share a sentiment of feeling unwelcome in a place they feel they helped build. “It's getting harder and harder, and we're more and more worn down from this. Instead of us being helped and being supported and working hard to make things better, we're having to feel like, well, if we're the problem, then how do we, you know, how do we address this?” she said.

The unresponsiveness, Fury said, is worsened by Salem’s lack of a public official or committee dedicated to tourism. Many decisions are instead relegated to Destination Salem, a private advertising board which “somehow got saddled as a sort of tourism board,” according to Fury, who said businesses were “frustrated” that they might get preferential treatment based on how much they pay the board annually.

“We’re just marketers,” said Destination Salem’s Assistant Director Stacia Cooper, who said the agency has no legislative pull, and that their sole role is to promote tourism in Salem – primarily through production of an annual tourism guide.

“[Tour guide] agencies that have more money to market, you know, so they're going to get a bigger part of the pie,” said Cooper. “If they are adhering to all letters of the law and they're running their businesses as a legit business, then we have no say."

Cooper acknowledged that while these disparities exist, the recent legislation is aimed at addressing broader concerns. “It's a little bit about not just spreading tourism over the town, kind of space-wise, but also time-wise. And, you know, we always tell everyone, don't come in October if you really want to visit and experience Salem because in October you can't even get a seat in a restaurant.” 

Despite her overall positive words toward the legislation’s goals, Cooper was more critical than public officials, claiming business owners will need to “reevaluate their business model and to think how they can either work with this or not.”

“Of the walking tours that I do know,” Cooper added, “I’ve never met such a group of people dedicated to the history and interpretation of the city. So they're kind of stewards in a way. I hope that – outside of a money grab for business – that they're looking at it that way.”