Hotel rates in Hawai‘i have surged up to 50%.
There’s no denying it: it’s gotten more expensive to visit Hawai‘i since the pandemic.
In an op-ed for SFGate, contributing editor Christine Hitt poses that very question, noting that average daily hotel rates statewide have risen 25% since 2019, and on some islands, including Hawai‘i Island (the Big Island) and Kaua‘i, the increases are in excess of 50%.
The state’s tourism promoters have said this is by design, as the state looks for ways to maintain the economic contribution of visitors to the state’s economy without growing their overall numbers. In 2025, they’ve largely succeeded, with total year-to-date visitor spend showing a healthy increase over 2024, with the total number of visitors remaining relatively flat.
But as Hitt points out, that also leaves travelers fewer options if their budgets are more modest—particularly Hawai‘i residents seeking to vacation on other islands, and native Hawaiians wishing to visit friends and family in Hawai‘i after being driven to the continental U.S. by the islands’ high cost of living.
It’s these travelers in particular that might find themselves squeezed out, as many tourism businesses offer discounts for Hawai‘i residents (who can show a Hawai‘i state ID), but not for Native Hawaiians living out of state, who have no standard ID recognizing them (tribal ID cards are issued by tribal governments that have a relationship with the federal government; there is no federally recognized tribal government for Native Hawaiians, as many feel that forming such a government would formalize their dispossession and compromise claims of Hawaiian sovereignty).
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When the pandemic hit in 2020, Hawai‘i tourism had been on a growth trajectory for over a century. The first hotel in the islands, the Moana Hotel in Waikīkī, opened in 1901, followed in 1927 by its now-sister hotel, the Royal Hawaiian. In the early days, Hawai‘i was an impossible dream for many Americans—travel there required the time and budget for a long overseas voyage, or a prohibitively expensive flight onboard a Pan American Clipper (in the 1930s, a round-trip fare from the West Coast cost around $16,000 in today’s dollars).
With the advent of the jet airliner, airfares came down, and Hawai‘i promoted its tourism industry to the masses. By the 1970s, United advertised round-trips from California to Hawai‘i for about $200 (around $1,400 today), and fares dropped even lower after the industry was deregulated in 1978. That drove tourism growth, which peaked at over 10 million annual visitors in 2019. With that peak came the lowest-ever polling among Hawai‘i residents that tourism had impacted them positively, and that’s when the state began to shift the focus from promoting tourism growth to managing the visitors they were getting to ensure they weren’t hogging the infrastructure also needed by local residents.
It’s basic economics that if demand for a product continues to grow, but the availability of that product levels off, the scarcity drives the price of the remaining units higher.
Hitt also focuses on hotel rates on the island of Kaua‘i, which has been a bit of an outlier this year. International visitor numbers statewide have remained depressed in 2025, largely driven by drops in visitors from Canada and a multiyear trend of fewer visitors from Asia. Kaua‘i, however, got a smaller share of international visitors than other islands, so traffic has remained steady, which has kept hotel demand elevated and rates higher.
But the question remains—should Hawai‘i make efforts to market to visitors with more modest incomes—and more importantly, would it make a difference?
Tourism promoters can’t change hotel pricing, and even if hotel pricing did change (hotel rates usually respond to market conditions on their own), would the other components of a visit follow suit? Would travelers who find airfare and lodging suddenly more affordable still face high costs for groceries, meals out, attractions, and transportation? It’s likely they would, given the “isolation tax” worked into the price on everything imported to the state (and that’s most things).
Travelers priced out of Hawai‘i can certainly choose other destinations they find to be a better value, and it’s the travelers who buy their vacations based solely on price and value that might not fit the profile of visitors that Hawai‘i tourism promoters seek out. Hawai‘i is a destination with unique cultural attributes, and the vacationers who continue to visit—even at a higher price—have voted and said those cultural attributes are worth the additional cost, because Hawai‘i is a destination that can’t be duplicated anywhere else.
The author recognizes the significance of Hawaiian Language diacritical marks, such as the kahako (macron), but some of these may have been omitted for web browser compatibility.
