Visitor arrivals to Hawaii were lackluster in February and early spring, meaning that there is less momentum heading into the peak summer season.
Hawaii’s international market is still down, and its core U.S. market is softening faster than expected with the percentage of U.S. households planning to travel dipping below 2024 and 2023. That stings since Hawaii’s top visitor source market is the United States, which represented 75% of Hawaii’s visitor arrivals in February.
What’s the problem? U.S. economic uncertainty is growing while travel prices are rising. The “Portrait of American Travelers” 2025 spring edition indicated that high prices are the primary reason leisure travelers might choose not to visit Hawaii.
It doesn’t bode well for Hawaii that these trends are happening as U.S. travelers are making summer plans, and international arrivals haven’t recovered enough to offset the market.
At the same time, recent leadership shake-ups at the Hawai‘i Tourism Authority have left the agency without a designated interim chief brand officer when tourism leaders say a centralized force is needed to coordinate and maximize the state’s marketing efforts.
Chris Kam, president and chief operating officer at Omnitrak, said the company’s Travel Market Penetration Index, which provides early insight into the percentage of U.S. residents who travel each month, showed that after a resilient start in January, demand for overall and discretionary U.S. domestic travel slowed in February.
Compared seasonally, he said market penetration for February dipped to 73.7%, compared with 78.8% in February 2024 and 82.5% in February 2023.
“Consumer confidence as reported by the U.S. Conference Board weakened, and the U.S. Travel Association’s travel price index rose, so you’ve got economic uncertainty and rising travel prices hitting the market at the same time,” Kam said. “The number of U.S. residents heading on international trips was relatively flat in February, and passenger traffic through TSA checkpoints grew 1% nationwide, suggesting that the upper end of the market was able to maintain a flattish performance in February, while the lower end fell out.”
He said Hawaii is considered a destination for the upper end of the U.S. market, but “flat is not great. That’s a cause for concern.”
Keith Vieira, principal of KV &Associates, Hospitality Consulting, said Hawaii’s hotel industry expects a weak first quarter, which is disappointing given that “January started out with a great deal of resilience.”
Worse yet, Vieira said Hawaii’s travel booking window is about two to three months out, so the weakness and uncertainty are affecting the pace of peak summer bookings.
“We’ve still got a ways to go, and we need to stay the path,” he said. “We need to have consistent brand marketing so our message and our narrative is one that our visitors are going to be moved by and creates demand for Hawaii over time. We need to build booking pace that gives us compression.”
Vieira expressed concern that the HTA has not designated a new interim chief brand officer since the March 21 departure of Daniel Naho‘opi‘i, who was working as HTA’s interim president and CEO as well as its chief brand officer.
“We are missing a consistent marketing message that hotels, airlines and wholesalers can attach to for their own marketing,” Vieira said. “When that happens you will see some turnaround and increase in the booking pace. The destination is still strong. People want to come here, but everyone else is after them and we have got to give them reasons to choose us.”
So far, Hawaii is losing ground.
Kam said that with Easter taking place in late April this year, March is expected to slow even more than February.
Jerry Gibson, president of the Hawai‘i Hotel Alliance, said hoteliers saw some spring break business in March, but “it was mediocre at best.”
“I think we are kind of in a transitional time where we don’t know exactly where we are going,” Gibson said. “Our pace is very short term. The stock market is getting blasted on a daily basis. Tax season is coming up, and people are saying maybe it’s best to hold off. I’m trying not to be a ‘Debbie downer,’ but I don’t see a lot out there.”
Gibson said February is usually one of the better months for Hawaii hotels because of Valentine’s Day and group travel but that it took some hits due to a drop in stays from the lucrative government sector, which is a base segment of business for the industry, particularly on Oahu.
“We are very wary about what’s going on, and it really started in February. What happened was a lot of (government workers) got their credit cards taken away, so they are obviously not traveling,” he said. “That segment, which is probably up to 40,000 rooms or so into Hawaii a month, was off about 55% for the month of February.”
Preliminary February visitor data released Thursday by the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism aligns with the trends that Kam and the hoteliers are reporting.
The daily count of visitors in Hawaii rose in February along with their average daily spending — but not much over February 2024, when the state was still reeling from the Maui wildfires’ negative impacts on tourism.
In February, DBEDT reported that on average there were 240,525 visitors daily in the Hawaiian Islands, up 1.9% from the daily visitor census in February 2024 and a decrease of 2.5% from February 2019.
Since the number of days in February differs depending on leap years, DBEDT chose to compare the average daily census of visitors. It was a leap year in 2024 and included an extra day in February.
When compared with February 2024, the average daily census of visitors this February increased 2.7% in Hawaii’s core U.S. West market and was up 7.4% from the U.S. East, Hawaii’s second-largest visitor source market.
The average daily census for Canada, which since the pandemic has jockeyed with Japan for the title of Hawaii’s top international market, was down 1.4%.
DBEDT Director James Kunane Tokioka said in a statement that the department will continue monitoring Canadian visitor arrivals.
“Canada and Hawaii have a long-standing relationship, and we are cautiously optimistic that although Canadian travel to the continental U.S. may decrease, it may not mean that Hawaii visits will decrease in the same manner,” he said. “At this time we do not see flight cancellations from Air Canada or WestJet.”
The average daily census in February declined 14.5% from Japan compared with February 2024, and it fell 4.9% from the category DBEDT calls “all other markets,” which includes all international markets outside of Japan and Canada.
Gibson said Japanese hotel bookings also were sluggish due to continued fuel surcharges and unfavorable exchange rates.
He said Canadian business also fell off in the later part of February, which added to Maui’s struggles to continue recovering from the Aug. 8, 2023, wildfires.
“We’re also impacted by the wildfires in California, which is our breadbasket since a lot of our travelers come from there,” Gibson said.
A bright spot in DBEDT’s February visitor statistics was that visitors spent more in February, which supports Hawaii’s tourism-dependent economy.
Visitors to Hawaii spent $61.7 million per day on average in February, up 8% from February 2024 and a 24.4% rise from February 2019. Tokioka said average daily visitor spending in February rose to $256.40 per visitor, the highest level historically in nominal terms.
However, Gibson noted that some of the higher prices reflect the higher costs that hoteliers are paying for labor and goods rather than actual profits.
