Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA) officials are forecasting another record-setting year of visitor arrivals and spending across the Aloha State in 2015, but they’re paying close attention to the price of oil and currency exchange rates as a shift in those economic indicators could hamper tourism industry growth across the destination.
“Overall, we’re looking very promising in 2015,” David Uchiyama, the HTA’s vice president of brand management, said last week during the agency’s annual Spring Marketing Update. “But it’s a very delicate year, and there could be variables in the market that change on a dime here: currency exchange rates, cost of fuel, the redeployment of aircraft, all of these factor in.”
More than 300 tourism industry stakeholders gathered at the Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu last week for the HTA’s spring update, which featured presentations by the destination’s global marketing contractors.
Uchiyama kicked off the proceedings by announcing the HTA’s latest tourism expectations for this year, projecting overall visitor arrivals in 2015 will climb 3.7% year over year to more than 8.5 million travelers, while total tourism expenditures will increase 5.6%, to nearly $15.6 billion.
A fair amount of that optimism appears to be linked to a surge in airlift to Hawaii, bolstered by significant projected growth from the U.S. mainland.
“The majority of the increase in seat inventory is coming from North America,” Uchiyama said of 2015. “We’re up 8% off of the [U.S.] West Coast and 9.8% off of the East Coast.”
Thanks to the growing number of domestic air seats scheduled to the Islands, the HTA now expects more than 3.3 million travelers will visit Hawaii from U.S. states west of the Rockies in 2015, a 2.7% increase over the total from the same market last year. Meanwhile, more than 1.7 million visitors are expected from the U.S East, an increase of 2%.
Still, Uchiyama cautioned that the HTA’s projected boost in domestic 2015 airlift was far from a guarantee.
“A lot of these carriers are pushing this inventory to us because [the price of] oil is down, so fuel costs are down,” he explained. “So they have the opportunity to hang in our market a little longer than they normally would. But if we start to see load factors start to drop and oil prices starting to go up, they are going to redeploy these aircraft onto other routes. We, as an industry, have to collectively work together to actively create demand, so we can keep that seat inventory in the market.”
Uchiyama also noted a decrease in overall visitor satisfaction among Hawaii travelers, pointing to statistics showing that the number of travelers who rated their Aloha State vacation as excellent was 78.5% in the first quarter of 2014, down 1.7% from the year prior. A larger 9% decline among Japanese travelers seemed more concerning to Uchiyama and left only 62% of visitors from Hawaii’s largest international market categorizing their trip as excellent.
“Put yourself in their position,” he said of Hawaii visitors. “The vacation cost goes up; wouldn’t your expectations go up, as well?”
He went on to list the most common complaints among visitors, including that hotels rooms aren’t clean, long waits at hotel front desks and tour activity counters, unfriendly hotel and activity staff members and complaints about tour bus drivers.
“I think over time we may have lost sight,” Uchiyama said. “And we need to refocus on our service delivery, [because] again, as vacation cost goes up, so do expectations.”