Hearts in Hawai'i
Is Hawai`i A Thing of the Past for us?
4/23/2023
To say that Hawai`i has been my favorite destination, and (even more importantly) my wife's is a gross understatement. We found the Islands Of Aloha in 1996 when we got married and enjoyed a wonderful honeymoon there. Ever since, it's been a place we have sought to return to over and over again. Ten more trips followed the initial trip, most recently in 2018. This has been an expensive, memory-filled obsession. We have loved nearly all of it--the scenery, the culture, the food.
While it had been expensive prior to COVID, it changed to EXPENSIVE afterward. A return trip to Maui was set for this month, and we had booked our condo room last year in anticipation of this trip at a price roughly 25% higher than we had paid in 2018. Did we like the increase? No. Did we understand why this was happening and accept the rate hike? Mostly. We understood that a) to make up for revenue lost during COVID, hotels and resorts were jacking up prices in an attempt to "make up the difference", b) suppy and demand. People had been cooped up for over a year and wanted to get out there again! c) greed. They knew they could take advantage of a sharp increase in demand and basically bilk travelers.
Once the condo was booked, we had to wait until the airfare/car could be booked, roughly eleven months before our trip. Once those items became available, a new surprise awaited us. Rates had gone up by 40-50% on both airfare and car rental prices!! After checking the prices nearly every day for the next several weeks and seeing these prices continue to tick upward, albeit slowly, our attitude toward the whole affair was turning to one of discouragement. For the first time in over 25 years, the question in mind became "Is this really worth what we'll be paying?". My wife was having similar reservations, but we hadn't discussed the "nuclear option" of canceling our trip.
Not yet, at least.
Not until I checked out the cancelation policy of the company we had booked the condo through and discovered we would only be subject to a $100 cancelation fee. At this point, we talked this over, quickly realizing a shared train of thought, and we pulled the plug.
There is more to this than money. Remember the "Islands of Aloha" quip I made at the start of this blog? There had been a slow, nearly indiscernable change in this over the past decade. It wasn't really "in your face" but it was out there. At least, that was how I was seeing it. Was it real? Maybe I was paying too much attention to social media, where the "haoles stay home" attitude was certainly evident. To a lesser extent, this attitude was also found on the TripAdvisor forum dedicated to Hawai`i, even with some of the "Destination Experts". Negativity of anything having to do with Hawai`i wasn't well received, even when it was well thought out. There was this underlying current of "Well, if you don't like Hawai`i, go elsewhere" without really attempting to understand where those with doubts or sincere questions were coming from.
The pandemic hit the hospitality business and hit it hard. Restaurants are still struggling to find wait staff and cooks. Some places require making reservations weeks if not months in advance. There are horror stories all over the place of people having to suffer interminable waiting times to get into a place. It's not what I care to sign up for.
Hawaiian governmental agencies weren't a help. Not when they started implementing fees and requiring reservations to visit certain spots such as Waianapanapa State Park or Iao Valley. They were also starting to implement, slowly, fees for visitors to park at certain beaches. My attitude toward has turned to, if you're going to nickle and dime visitors ON TOP of the rapidly increasing costs to travel there, then fine--we just won't go there. Officials in Hawaii were, whether they admitted to or cared about this, creating an atmosphere where only the well-to-do (or gullible) would visit their islands. Again, if this is their goal, then fine. There are countless wonderful vacation opportunities elsewhere, starting with the mainland, which cost a fraction of what it costs to visit Hawai`i.
In the end, within a month of canceling our trip to Hawai`i, we had booked a trip to Door County, a place we had never visited and was only a seven hour drive from Duluth. No dealing with TSA. No sitting in the "cattle car" coach section of an airplane, with their sub-standard, overpriced food, too narrow seats, kids kicking the back of your seat--you get the picture. Flying to Hawai`i was NEVER a nice experience, even with the excitement of knowing that within ten hours, we'd be sitting in our rental car on our way to our condo. And the flights home were nearly always worse.
Will we ever return? It's hard to say. We're planning on sticking to the Lower 48 for our next few vacations, and from that point we'll see how we feel.
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