Hawaii Eagerly Seeking Same Old Visitors
Koko Crater - Oahu
While I was exploring Europe, the Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA) released its budget for tourism marketing in 2010, which Pacific Business News analyzed in its September 4 edition. The article contained sidebars that attracted this economist’s attention, putting Hawaii’s visitor arrival numbers for 2008 right next to HTA’s planned marketing budget for 2010. Now, I know you are not supposed to compare 2008 numbers with 2010 numbers, but I don’t have the HTA budget numbers for 2008 – and I just can’t resist seeing which tourists we are spending the most money on to attract.
Dividing the 2010 budget plans by the 2008 arrivals from each region, here’s what we get in the way of marketing expenditure per visitor for each region:
- North America (U.S. & Canada) $ 4.65
- Japan $ 6.22
- Other Asia (Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong) $ 13.51
- Oceania (Australia, New Zealand) $ 4.50
- Europe $ .87
- Latin America $ 0
One shouldn’t compare the numbers as I have done, but I am only using them to look at orders of magnitude – which are probably close to what the comparable numbers would indicate.
The conclusion is pretty clear. HTA continues to ignore world markets that are highly lucrative for other travel destinations, and continues to concentrate its marketing funds in markets in which Hawaii has long been a well developed brand. The big spend per visitor for Other Asia may be appropriate as some of these markets are newly opened and visa waiver programs hold the promise of building these markets. But I am baffled by the continuing spend on Japan and the U.S. West Coast. It’s not that I object to spending money there, but I am concerned about NOT spending marketing funds in super rich travel markets like Europe and Latin America. I know from my years living and working in Europe that European tourists are exactly what Hawaii should be going after. These are visitors who will stay for far longer vacations than our U.S., Canadian or Japanese customers – and will likely spend more than the first two on a daily basis. And Latin America always gets left out. Hawaii seems to have a cultural bias that prevents its decision makers from taking Latin America seriously. The fact is that Latin America is a potential source for high quality, high spending visitors without visa issues – yet HTA is spending nothing in this region according to the published 2010 budget.
Isn’t it time we thought about re-allocating some marketing funds? For any other export business, a downturn requires that you take good care of existing customers AND that you go after new customers. HTA doesn’t seem to have fully glommed on to the latter point.
