Category Archives: Hawaii

Who Visits The U.S., But Not Hawaii?

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I’ve had a few posts about Hawaii’s tourism marketing lately – and I’m not finished. But I interrupt this broadcast to bring you the national results for 2011. The U.S. Department of Commerce has published its data for the entire country, which added up to 62 million international visitors last year. That’s 2.5 million better than we have done before, further cementing travel and tourism as one of the top export industries of the United States.

Our top markets for absolute numbers of inbound visitors, of course, are Canada and Mexico. Canadians flocked south in record numbers, growing 5% in a single year. Visitors from Mexico were flat. Does this reflect an appearance of a less friendly attitude on the part of the gringos at the border? I don’t know. Once you back Canada and Mexico out of the numbers, the United States attracted 27.9 million overseas visitors in 2011, up 6% from 2010.

Do the French prefer Hawaii or ...?

The gaudiest growth rates were from South America (up 16%), Oceania (14%) and eastern Europe (up 11%). They were followed by the Middle East (up 10%) and western Europe (up 5%). Those familiar with Hawaii’s marketing will notice that our tropical paradise ignores most of these growth markets. The state does no marketing at all in South America, eastern Europe and the Middle East – and virtually none in western Europe. The Hawaii Tourism Authority has hit the trifecta of missing out on what is working for the rest of the country. Most of the national increase in visitors from western Europe, by the way, came from Germany and France. HTA, of course, does no marketing in France. Only Oceania shows up as a positive for HTA in the real growth group. You get lucky sometimes.

Where do our friends from Asia enter into all this? Hardly at all. The growth markets from Asia are South Korea and China, so Hawaii did do something right. But visitors from Asia as a whole only grew by 3% last year, the slowest growth rate of any region in the world (even Africa was up 4%). Yet Hawaii continues to put its marketing eggs in baskets that aren’t growing very much. Go figure.

Hawaii Still Slights Europe

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If you can’t fly here without changing planes, we’re not interested. That’s the message that Hawaii broadcasts in Europe by underfunding its European contractor. I’ve harped on this for what seems forever, but it was clear once again at the Hawaii Tourism Authority’s spring market briefing that I attended last week.

HTA’s Europe contractor, AviaCircle, put on a brave show and never complained about its budget, but those who read between the lines could see what is happening. HTA has shorted its European operations for years and, responding to criticism, got a special bill passed by the Hawaii state legislature that exempts the organization from Hawaii’s sunshine laws. HTA argues this was necessary to conceal its marketing plans from the “competition”, all of whom know what’s going on. It is more effective at hiding budget numbers from critics who wonder why HTA isn’t going after rich long-staying travelers no matter where they come from.

Early European visitors frolic on Kauai.

The Europe presentation last week made it clear that Europe remains a minor concern for HTA’s marketing “experts”. AviaCircle was largely reduced to touting all the free advertising it was getting by cashing in on Hawaii’s brand in Europe. All of their activities are in the United Kingdom and Germany, ignoring the impressive numbers of independent travelers from markets like Switzerland and Russia. HTA did pay for their European reps to attend PowWow in San Francisco last year, where they met with forty European travel operators. I asked about HTA activities at ITB, the world’s most important travel industry event, which was going on in Berlin last week. AviaCircle said they were there, but – when I pressed – they admitted that they had no Hawaii stand because they couldn’t afford it. They were just meeting with individual operators during ITB. That means HTA missed any chance to develop new markets from all the international operators that jamb the aisles at ITB. (I know, I once managed the U.S. Pavilion at ITB.)

True, European travelers don’t spend as much per day as Asian visitors to Hawaii, but they still fork over a respectable $159 a day. And they stay in Hawaii much longer than the Asians, an average of 13.1 days per trip, meaning that European spending added up to nearly $240 million last year. Surely that’s worth more than $100,000, which is my guess at HTA’s annual budget for Europe.

HTA makes a big thing locally about using tourism to help the economies of Hawaii’s neighbor islands and to expand appreciation for Hawaiian culture. According to HTA’s own statistics, it is the European visitor who is most likely to leave Oahu and get out to the other islands. And surveys show that the Europeans are far more interested in local culture and history than are Asian visitors, who list shopping as their #1 interest. HTA isn’t exactly doing what it says when it slights the European markets.

Yes, it is inconvenient and expensive to get from Europe to Hawaii. AviaCircle quoted packages from Germany at nearly $4,000 per person and the trip takes about 18 hours in the air. Despite that, 114,823 Europeans made it out to our islands in 2011, close to a 2% increase in the face of immense economic difficulties. The United States should attract some 12 million Europeans to its shores in 2012. Surely, with a little more effort and some serious budget, Hawaii can encourage a fraction of those to continue on in our direction.

Hawaii’s Asian Markets For Tourism

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Hawaii has a great brand in Japan and ranks #3 for Japanese leisure travelers, eclipsing a whole bunch of Asian destinations that are a lot closer and lot less expensive. Japan remains a great market for Hawaii tourism, but it is a mature market. The Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA) and others in the visitor industry will point to a rebound from Japan’s disasters of a year ago and say that all is well. The fact remains that Hawaii’s visitor count from Japan has been stagnant or even down a little since 2007, at roughly 1.2 million visitors a year. Nothing to sniff at – and not a market to ignore – but it isn’t going to grow a whole lot. The Japanese population is aging, less likely to look for active vacations with every year that passes.

This, of course, is not what HTA’s Japan contractor told his audience at the spring market meeting in Honolulu last week. Tourism marketing people are professional optimists after all. Hawaii is a wonderful brand in Japan and, with good marketing, this is a cow that can be milked for years to come. But, like an aging cow, there is likely to be less milk as the years go by. It’s a good thing that Korea and China seemed lined up right behind.

The Japan presentation at the HTA meeting did hold some interesting datapoints. One that caught my eye is the growth in independent travelers. 21.6% of our Japanese visitors are doing the trip on their own, rather than as part of a tour. This reflects both a maturing travel market and the huge number of repeat visitors who are more confident about their ability to navigate Hawaii and know what they want when they are here. It also reflects an increasing tendency by Japanese visitors to visit the neighbor islands, not just the beaches and shops of Waikiki.

HTA is gearing up its operations in China and South Korea, responding to nascent demand and to improving visa availability. Korea, of course, saw a surge of travelers headed for Hawaii’s beaches after the country was granted U.S. visa waiver status. That surge is still running, prompting a 90% increase in seating capacity from Seoul to Honolulu in 2011. Korean visitors to Hawaii nearly doubled between 2009 and 2011, growing to nearly 101,000 last year. Both Hawaiian Airlines and Asiana entered the direct flight market early in 2011. Typical for a new and developing market, Korean visitors focused on Oahu with more than 92% bound for Waikiki. That said, Koreans are showing more independence than our early Japanese visitors; nearly 30% also visited Maui. Not surprisingly, roughly 82% are first-time visitors.

Will they get visas?

The advent of charter flights by China Eastern Airlines, more expeditious handling of tourist visas by the American consulate in Shanghai and cooperation from major Chinese booking partners led to a 29.4% increase in the number of Chinese visitors in 2011. That made the total slightly less than 80,000, but the trend is good and growth to Hawaii exceeded the percentage growth in China’s total outbound travel. Like Korea, the Chinese traveler is heavily skewed towards first-timers (83%). They are also Hawaii’s big spenders, taking an average of $382/day out of their purses and wallets during the few days they are here. I am encouraged that HTA is doing a nine-city road show to eastern Chinese cities that they haven’t covered before. As positive as things look, however, there are difficulties.

HTA’s presenters mentioned that visa availability in China has improved, though it was curious that they heap all the praise on President Obama’s January 2012 speech at Disneyworld. My contacts say that the improvement (shorter waiting times, 90% approval rate) was well underway due to ideas from the American consulate in Shanghai that were already being copied by other U.S. consulates in China. I guess we have to give the credit to our local boy, but I can assure you it wasn’t Presidential pressure that did the trick.

Big news about Taiwan. Taiwan is eligible for the U.S. visa waiver program and is likely to win waiver status before the year is out. When that happens, HTA says, China Airlines plans to re-establish non-stop flights between Taipei and Honolulu. That’s great, not only for the tourism business, but because it opens more options for anybody moving between Hawaii and S.E. Asia.

Otherwise, HTA plans to have a stand at a travel show in the Philippines. And that’s it for Asia. Nothing in Singapore, Malaysia, the Russian Far East (where they are lining up to go to Guam), India, Brunei, the Persian Gulf region, or any of the others.