Hawaii summer travel demand near 2019 levels

Summer is the first time since the pandemic began that Hawaii has a chance to close in on record-breaking 2019 tourism arrivals.

April visitor arrivals were just 4% lower than April 2019, and that was without the significant return of international arrivals, especially from Japan, which historically has been Hawaii’s top international market.

Some 818,268 visitors came to Hawaii in April, representing a 96% recovery from April 2019, according to preliminary visitor data released Thursday by the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.

Airlines servicing Hawaii have added nearly 13% more seats from May to July than they did during the same period of 2021, when summer travel volumes strained supply, exacerbating rental car shortages and making it hard to get restaurant and activity reservations even for locals.

More than 2.9 million of the total 3.6 million airline seats for the May-to-July period are for domestic travel. Still, carriers also have added more than 393,000 seats from international destinations. Hawaii Lodging and Tourism Association President and CEO Mufi Hannemann said Hawaii hotels are expecting summer occupancy to surge to between 80% and 90%.

Is it time to break out the bubbly? That depends.

The summer numbers are depressing for those who miss the quiet of pandemic restrictions and fewer tourist arrivals. Those who hold that view tend to equate arrivals gains with longer commutes, greater parking difficulties, overused resources, higher prices, greater housing challenges and communities that have lost their local feel.

Visitor increases are more welcomed by those who view Hawaii tourism as necessary for the health of the economy and tax generation. However, times are still too frenetic to plan a celebration.

The U.S. economy, which has led Hawaii’s tourism recovery, is weighed down by high inflation, rising interest rates and labor and supply shortages.

Airlines and tourist destinations are anticipating huge crowds this summer as travel restrictions ease and pandemic fatigue overcomes lingering fear of contracting COVID-19 during travel. However, airlines have thousands of fewer employees than they did in 2019, and that has, at times, contributed to widespread flight cancellations.

More than a thousand flights worldwide were canceled by midafternoon Sunday, adding to the mounting number of scrubbed flights during the Memorial Day holiday weekend, which is the kickoff to the U.S. summer travel season.

Gas prices in 2022 are the highest in U.S. history, a factor that along with pilot shortages has the potential to increase plane fares. That could prove devastating to a remote destination like Hawaii, which relies on airplanes and cruise ships.

The spread of new COVID- 19 variants also has the potential to cause tourism turbulence. The state Department of Health on Wednesday reported the state’s seven-­day average of new COVID-19 cases at 1,098 over the past week, representing the ninth consecutive weekly increase.

The state’s average positivity rate jumped for the 10th consecutive week, rising to 18.3% from 16.9% on May 18. DOH also has detected the presence of the highly contagious BA.4 and BA.5 COVID-19 variants in Hawaii.

The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 hit 1 million on May 16. The confirmed number of dead is equivalent to a Sept. 11, 2001, attack every day for 336 days. It is roughly equal to how many Americans died in the Civil War and World War II combined. It’s as if almost all of Hawaii were wiped out.

Hawaii economist Paul Brewbaker told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in an email that he expects the latest surge in COVID-19 could lead to a pandemic- induced wave of travel cancellations that causes a 25% reduction in Hawaii tourism arrivals in June and July — a serious hit considering that it hasn’t even been a year since omicron and delta caused similar damage.

Brewbaker said each of the past two COVID-19 waves, the delta wave last summer and the omicron wave last winter, caused a 25% decrease in seasonally adjusted Hawaii air passenger arrivals — the equivalent of a 9/11-size drop.

Brewbaker said arrivals to Hawaii decreased to 600,000 from 800,000 arrivals per month after delta and again after omicron.

“I mean, three 9/11 events in one year, three times that passenger counts dropped by one-quarter. If the BA.2 wave turns out to have a similar tourism impact to the delta and omicron waves, for three independent shocks of that sort, that’s a lot of volatility,” he said. “That’s a full-on roller coaster.”

Brewbaker, whose reputation tends to skew between economic genius and shock jock, has favored conservative public-health policy for much of the pandemic. He took a contrarian’s view of those who used the need to stimulate the economy as a rallying cry to remove Hawaii’s travel restrictions and indoor masking while the pandemic is still ongoing.

For more than two years, he has said, “Pandemics depress the economy, public health interventions do not.”

History, he has argued, is clearly on his side, going back to the Spanish flu of the late 1900s, where cities that shut down too late or relaxed restrictions too early experienced the highest death tolls.

His latest theory gains credence because he called the past two variant-related arrivals dips. He also was the only panelist during the 2020 Annual Outlook & Economic Forecast Forum put on by The Pacific Asia Travel Association and the Travel and Tourism Research Association who saw COVID-19 as a serious economic threat to Hawaii. At that point in early February 2020, most of the state’s top economic officials and policymakers still saw COVID-19 as a SARS-like blip on the radar.

By the end of March 2020, Gov. David Ige was asking tourists not to come to Hawaii and taking public- health steps to collapse the industry, which only this quarter might return to pre-pandemic levels after more than two years of stops and starts.

Brewbaker acknowledges that arrivals numbers for April were good, and there was a lot of enthusiasm for travel to Hawaii earlier this spring. But come August he expects to see the current COVID-19 surge reflected in new arrivals drops.

“The caveat for this summer is that people can exercise their right to cancel travel plans if things start to look sketchy,” Brewbaker said.

In the meantime he wonders why more tourism and government officials aren’t talking about potential tourism shocks.

A reason is that not everyone fully embraces Brewbaker’s theory that the latest COVID-19 variants will affect travel as greatly as earlier variants.

For starters, some travelers and policymakers seem to have turned from trying to eradicate the threat of COVID-19 to learning to live with it, which suggests a greater tolerance for risk. Vaccines and therapeutics to treat COVID-19 are readily available, and hospitalizations and ICU bed utilization are not rising as fast as they did during other COVID-19 spikes.

Lynette Eastman, general manager of the Surfjack Hotel & Swim Club in Waikiki, said that she’s “cautiously optimistic about summer.”

“We’re hot right now and COVID hates sunshine. As long as there aren’t any new COVID restrictions, I think people will continue to travel,” she said. “If there are drops, I don’t believe it will be 25%.”

Hannemann said the fact that COVID is still lingering out there could cause arrivals dips.

However, he added, “I’m pretty confident that we are able to maintain the numbers as long as we do all that we can to maintain safe practices.We need to be very careful about gatherings and staying home when we are sick. What we don’t want to do is shut down and retreat.”

Keith Vieira, principal of KV & Associates, Hospitality Consulting said that he has heard that the pandemic, much like 9/11, has increased the desire for human connections, which benefits travel.

“After 9/11 we didn’t know when anyone would want to travel. Then we saw people start coming. They saw that life was short, and they wanted to get tighter with their families,” Vieira said. “That’s happening again. There are so many people that haven’t traveled during the pandemic, and clearly there is pent-up demand.”

COVID-19 counts did not stop Emma Rosca and her daughter Daria Rosca from spending 11 hours on a plane to fly from Queens, N.Y., to Hawaii. The pair, who were sunning on Kuhio Beach in Waikiki on Thursday, said they were ready to escape COVID-19 fatigue.

“I like to act like COVID never happened,” Emma Rosca said.

Daria Rosca said, “I try to plan my time off based on the weather, not COVID cases.”

“We choose Hawaii because it’s an island. We really enjoy the culture and the Asian influence,” she said. “We really enjoy the greetings and that everyone says, ‘Thank you.’ We feel wanted here.”

Chris Kam, president and chief operating officer of OmniTrak, said Brewbaker’s expectation of a contraction might be right, but not for the reasons or the extent that he suggests.

Kam said preliminary TravelTrakAmerica syndicated data fielded in May shows that “near-term travel demand for Hawaii is holding steady. Despite news of the latest COVID variant and rising travel prices, 5% of U.S. travelers are considering a Hawaii vacation in the next six months — a level even with May 2021 travel considerations.”

He said TravelTrakAmerica measures of Travel Sentiment in the areas of travelers’ interest in travel, personal financial conditions and perceptions of safety of travel are all holding steady, too.

Kam said the “one big area of concern is affordability of travel,” in which 70% of U.S. travelers feel that travel is now less affordable, compared with 57% who felt this way in May 2021.

Kam’s remarks were made as the average per-person, per-trip cost to Hawaii in April shot up to almost $1,950, a nearly 26% rise from April 2019 and an almost 13% increase from April 2021. Travelers to Hawaii in April also paid an average daily rate for a hotel room of $371, up 36% from April 2019.

“Affordability is a clearly a concern, but we also know that travelers are hard-wired to continue traveling,” Kam said. “Booked travel is still a go, but future bookings could slow.”

Some travelers have found creative ways to reduce costs, he said.

Neither COVID-19 nor costs stopped Megan Drake, a visitor from Santa Monica, Calif., from taking a last- minute trip to Oahu.

Drake, who works in IT staffing, used her Southwest credit card points to fly to Hawaii for free on Tuesday. She only had to take one vacation day, since she worked remotely until 2 p.m. each day, and flew back home Sunday.

Drake said she does not think COVID-19 is going to affect U.S. traveler sentiment for Hawaii this summer.

“It’s been going on so long. I think most people are over it. They want to live life a little bit,” she said. “I went through LAX, that’s one of the biggest airports, and no one was wearing a mask and there weren’t any COVID protocols.”

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The Associated Press and Star-Advertiser reporter Nina Wu contributed to this story.