About 791,781 tourists visited Hawaii in the first month of this year. This represents a recovery of 96.8% in total arrivals from January 2019, the benchmark month before the COVID-19 pandemic, and a rise of 37.9% over January 2022.
The information was just made available by Hawaii’s Department of Commerce, Economic Development & Tourism (DBEDT), which also revealed that $1.89 billion was spent by tourists to the islands in January 2023. That represents a 35.5 percent increase over the $1.4 billion in expenditures in January 2022. Also, it represents a significant increase in spending from the benchmark year of 2019, when collections totaled $1.62 billion.
According to a statement from John De Fries, president and chief executive officer of the Hawaii Tourism Authority, “Hawaii’s visitor industry and the state’s economic recovery continued to be driven primarily by increased spending among visitors from the U.S. West and U.S. East, followed by the steady recovery of our key international visitor markets,”
During the first month of this year, Canadian tourists also made their fair share of trips to Hawaii. The most recent statistics shows that Canadian tourists’ overall spending almost reached 2019 levels.
At the Hawaii Tourism Authority, “we measure our performance by resident sentiment, visitor satisfaction, per-person-per-day visitor expenditure, and total visitor spending,” said De Fries. These four metrics, which were included in our strategic plan for the years 2020–2025, “reflect a balance between the economic benefits of tourism and its effects on local populations.”
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The majority—775,132—of the 791,781 guests who arrived in Hawaii in January did so by plane travel. Also, 16,648 people arrived by cruise ship, which is a rising trend for cruise guests this year. In contrast, 7,004 cruise passengers were present in 2022. Additionally, only 12,033 cruise passengers visited in 2019, implying that there are now more passengers than there were before the pandemic.
Source: Travel Pulse
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