Akamai Arrival, the pilot program for a digitized agriculture disclosure form, left out the optional tourism questions from the back of the form, creating a blip in the state’s continuous tourism arrivals set that goes back to before the jet age.
Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke said the decision was made to initially leave off the questions to start with a simplified form.
Eliminating the tourism questions for the pilot program, which runs from March 1 to May 31, caused the state Department of Business Economic Development and Tourism to remove its daily passenger counts, a real-time measuring tool that has been available since Sept. 11, 2001. The data gap from the pilot also has left economists and tourism research professionals stumped on how to get enough nuanced information to calculate year-over-year comparisons for the monthly visitor arrivals and spending reports.
Jennifer Chun, DBEDT director of tourism research, estimates that the pilot eliminates tourism questions from all arriving Southwest flights, all American flights, five Alaska flights, one Delta flight, two Hawaiian flights and two United flights — roughly 31% of scheduled flights and 28.4% of scheduled air seats.
Paul Brewbaker, principal of TZ Economics, said an interruption to tourism data could have serious repercussions as economists use it to make economic forecasts. Brewbaker added that the Council of Revenues relies on tourism data to figure out how much money is available for the budget. The information also is used in bond ratings, which set the interests rates for government borrowing, he said.
Brewbaker said interrupting Hawaii’s tourism data set is problematic when tourism “accounts for about one-third of the neighbor island economy and 15% to 20% of the statewide economy.”
“I’m going to go write some papers now that say, ‘Here’s what the tourism data tell us, and from here on out we’ll never know — so this is economic history now.’”
The initiative was authorized under Act 196, and has been touted by state leaders, including Gov. Josh Green, Luke and Sen. Glenn Wakai (D, Kalihi-Salt Lake-Pearl Harbor) as a significant step toward modernizing Hawaii’s biosecurity efforts.
Luke worked with legislators, the state Department of Agriculture, airline partners and stakeholders to develop the digital agriculture form pilot program.
“The consensus of all the airlines is that they wanted to start with a simplified form just under the agricultural declaration, and then we have the option to add more stuff as they get better in communication and customer questions,” Luke said. “This is kind of the first step, and then we are already having discussions about how do we reintegrate the visitor information.”
Wakai, who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Intergovernmental Affairs, said he started advocating for a digital agricultural form five years ago, and initially was met with resistance, until 2024 when lawmakers passed a law encouraging the migration from paper to an app.
He said ending the in-flight paper agricultural form would save at least $800,000 annually, but more important, digitization increases completion rates and strengthens protections against invasive species. Passengers typically would complete the digitized form in advance of boarding their flight.
“Compliance for the digitized agricultural form was north of 70%, and with the paper agricultural form it was 60%,” Wakai said. “Now we are in discussions about how to add the tourism data. We may need to figure out incentives because participation in the tourism questions is voluntary.”
DBEDT Director James Kunane Tokioka said agency received complaints after the pilot began March 1 and the agency removed daily passenger counts from its website.
Tokioka said that he met with Luke and the Department of Agriculture on Friday to try to determine a workaround.
“I was very encouraged by the meeting,” he said. “By the middle of next week, we are hoping that we can figure out how to get the passenger count.”
But Chun noted that the drop in collected tourism data goes beyond passenger counts and also affects visitor statistics methodology for the Visitor Satisfaction and Activity report. She said the pilot also could affect de facto population calculations.
Chris Kam, president and chief operating officer of Omnitrak, the current vendor for the in-flight form, said the in-flight tourism portion of the form goes back to 1950, and the continuous data set has given Hawaii a strategic advantage by providing a snapshot of where visitors are going in Hawaii and their length of stay, which is a key to determining how much they spend per day.
“I’m not defending one format over another. I think going digital is unavoidable and this is the right direction, but we need to make sure we do it prudently from a research perspective,” Kam said. “We need a bridge during the pilot, and we need it sooner rather than later.”
Rep. Adrian Tam (D, Waikiki), who chairs the House Committee on Tourism, and Sen. Lynn DeCoite (D, Lanai-Molokai-Hana), who chairs the Senate Committee on Economic Development and Tourism, said they want to see tourism data restored quickly.
“We are in the middle of a legislative session and deciding on our budget,” Tam said. “We look at everything that the Council of Revenues and UHERO (University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization) puts out. The Hawaii Tourism Authority is part of the government, and they are in the middle of fighting for their budget requests, too.”
DeCoite said tourism data needs to go beyond the passenger counts so that lawmakers can determine which tourism markets to invest in and where destination stewardship mitigation is needed.
“I want to know who is resident and who is visitor. I want to know what the visitor is actually doing — if they are coming under business or convention; are they actually going out and using the parks; are they part of a footprint that is impacting infrastructure here,” she said. “That will help us isolate out if the extra added impact fee that we are talking about would be sufficient or do we continue to do a reservation system.”
Luke said it has not been determined when the tourism questions will be reintegrated into the digital agricultural form, and that more change is inevitable. She said conversations are needed now to determine how to capture the tourism data if the state moves from a digital agricultural declaration form to an advance notice. Luke said the optional tourism questions currently have about about a 40% compliance rate.
She said the Legislature has provided the Hawai‘i Tourism Authority with $3 million to begin planning for a smart tourism app, which could incorporate visitor data into a whole tourism experience.
“People cannot wait until some things are done, and then they panic and react,” Luke said.
