Over the past year, as local residents realized the absence of tourists, while financially painful, had other benefits. Areas usually overrun by visitors were suddenly available for us to enjoy without the overcrowding, causing a reassessment of the central role that has been ceded to the visitor industrial complex in recent years.
There are now attempts to sell minor tweaks to better regulate use of heavily impacted resources, from Diamond Head to Hanauma Bay and beyond, as if that will be enough to satisfy the hunger for a reshuffling of priorities when it comes to tourism.
I woke up yesterday morning and saw this article in the travel industry news site, Skift.com. There’s a pay wall, but Skift allows nonsubscribers to read three stories for free.
Here’s an excerpt from the Skift article, “Why Tourism Desperately Needs a New Performance Metric Post-Pandemic,” by Lebawit Lily Girma
– Mar 23, 2021 2:30 am
Since Covid, platitudes on greening and reinventing tourism have echoed globally across the industry. A general consensus exists among destinations and tourism businesses that the industry must “build back better.”
It’s not a novel debate. It rings that way now because of the pandemic’s brutal impact on travel. But let’s take at face value — once more — this industry-wide clamor to make travel more sustainable. How will tourism determine “building back better” on the other side of recovery? Surely it cannot continue pretending that its success lies in arrival numbers and contributions to gross domestic product?
Yet as vaccine distribution accelerates and consumer confidence rises, governments are already back to projecting visitor numbers and counting tourism jobs recovered, while comparing performance levels to 2019.
Pay attention to that last sentence, because it describes exactly what is already happening here in Hawaii: “Yet as vaccine distribution accelerates and consumer confidence rises, governments are already back to projecting visitor numbers and counting tourism jobs recovered, while comparing performance levels to 2019.”
That’s exactly what we’ve been getting here, repeated news accounts of visitor arrival numbers, airline passenger loads, hotel occupancy rates, visitor tax revenues. All of the traditional ways of measuring tourisms impacts. And all that avoid the lingering question, how are the lives of Hawaii residents impacted by this industry, are we better off as the industry “recovers”?
The Skift story goes on:
What’s also baffling is that an industry relying on people-to-people exchanges has mostly omitted measuring success according to locals’ sentiments about tourism. Instead, most governments have remained focused on the incoming tourist’s satisfaction.
“How do we measure acceptability of tourism in a destination? We identify places and we don’t even know if these people welcome tourism because we go there with a bag of goodies,” Kopher-Gona said, referring to promises of resort jobs as an example. “We’ve not asked them if they have welcomed tourism.”
Perhaps, as the article suggests, in addition to measures like visitor arrivals and spending, we also need to also use measures of income inequality, poverty, housing affordability, number of residents per household, and so on, when evaluating the impact of tourism.
Definitely food for thought.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Sunday I saw a group of 30 spring break tourists in Kahala littering the beach with red cups and bottles of alcohol and trash. They had a table full of booze on the beach and were happily leaving their trash everywhere. No masks and no cares for Hawaii. When they left, instead of using the beach access they all climbed over the fence into someone’s yard because it saved them a minute of walking.
No I don’t miss tourists.
Hawaii needs to diversify the economy. But many folks would prefer subsistence farming over tech industry. Ideology is supplanting reasonable approaches to the future of Hawaii.
Great observation. Actually, many people SAY they prefer subsistence farming, especially if they won’t personally be the ones under the sun in the kalo loi.
We need to get beyond overreliance on tourism, which is an easy industry for making money but also tends to retard more challenging economic development and relies on cheap labor. At the same time, warped nostalgia and blind idealism can be debilitating.
Unfortunately, there’s no coherent or convincing leadership anywhere in sight.
Hawaii is better off with far fewer tourists who spend more money. Unfortunately, that will take legislative will, innovation and a vision.
So, in other words, “no chance”?
We have to make decisions about ways to lower the number of tourists. In 2019 we had 30 million coming to Hawaii. There was no discussion about whether this was too large a number. We were just forced to accept these tourists with the rationale that the large number benefited our economy.
Day to day life in Hawaii was somewhat more pleasant for those who live here. Traffic was less. Beaches were not as crowded. Let’s return to a Hawaii as it once was.
Ten million visitors came to Hawaii in 2019, not thirty million.
That’s still far too many, but let’s keep it real.
And life wasn’t as pleasant for many people laid off from tourism industry jobs as it may have been for you.
Let’s not ignore that.
Just some thoughts on this…
Hawai’i to my knowledge is one of the destinations that does pay attention to resident sentiment. One of the biggest stories about tourism in the past several months was the dive in resident sentiment towards tourism….even though tourism had been shut down for the better part of a year.
If you ask any of the tourism industry’s leaders/stakeholders, you’ll note a shared vision of the high-spending, apt-to-return traveler. This is a specific target that will take specific marketing and attraction. Unlikely for this to happen with HTA about to have its budget stripped to the bones.
In regards to diversification of our economy- yeah, that’d be great. But that’s a movement that will take years, if not decades. Until an industry springs up or is developed that generates the tax revenues and supports the same number of jobs that our local tourism industry does…good luck.
Our corrupt government, including legislators, city council members and the executive offices are too busy protecting their own power bases to have any vision about Hawai’i’s future – as in the well being of the people and the land for future generations. It was all nice talk about diversifying the economy at the early stages of the pandemic, but there’s been nothing since. It’s business as usual. Too busy defending Sharon Har and trying to get rid of anything and anyone who would keep them accountable. Oh well, you get what you pay for.
Went to Waikiki today to pick something up. Already the masses are oozing in. Haoles parading about proudly without face masks (as if they are immune due to white privilege) and masked up Asians packed in tight lines to buy an overpriced açaí bowl. I was glad to get what I went there for and hurry the hell out!
IAN, with all due respect, in 10 years readers of your blog will be more concerned about affordable senior care options and prescription drug prices than whether or not tourists are over-crowding the streets and beaches of Waikiki. In other words, “which Long’s has the easiest parking?” might be a likely discussion post in the not so distant future.
Economists call tourism an “engine” for good reason: it drives everything else. I get it. Hotel work is not for everyone. But hotels fuel many other jobs and careers that young working people need.
It’s called the “silver tsunami” for a reason.
That may be. But isn’t it relevant to know whether growth in tourism increases or decreases income inequality? Housing affordability? Etc, etc., etc.? Hence the argument for a better group of metrics than we have had available in the past.
IAN, your thoughtful and courteous response is greatly appreciated.
In my personal opinion, the tourism industry is represented by people who are sociologically tone deaf and don’t have the ability to think outside the box of “mass” tourism, thus limiting them to seeing all of Hawaii as a potential cash cow. The intent of your original post is true, Hawaii can do better than that.
Hawaii Tourism Model-10 million tourists a year
Extract Hawaii’s Resources- water, electricity, emergency response, housing supply
Degrade Hawaii’s Resources- pollute reefs with sunblock, erode trails, air quality, road congestion, sewage
Profits Go Overseas
While my comment isn’t in the scope of your post, your last line “food for thought” encouraged me. Intelligent discussion around our eating habits are as lacking in media as are metrics in tourism that quantify its impacts on local residents. With 8 billion Homo sapiens running around, nothing we eat collectively is in moderation. (Just as there is no moderation in welcoming tourist arrivals). The media depends on advertising dollars from the very industries which can have negative impact in our local communities (tourism) and also the planet (industrial fishing and meat production). Other than Civil Beat, I can’t imagine other media biting the hand that feeds them.