Who is the ideal European visitor to Hawaiʻi in 2025? According to Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority’s marketing strategy, it’s a mindful yet wealthy person keen on inner balance, self-reflection and stress relief. 

As a resident of France, I am fascinated by how HTA markets Hawaiʻi to people in Europe. This year, its efforts have been centered around “The People. The Place. The Hawaiian Islands,” its umbrella tourism campaign. 

On the European side, the campaign focuses on “high-value travelers” from the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland, aiming to entice visitors with deep pockets who will stay longer and spend more. 

And of course, it’s positioned with all the ad agency parlance you’d expect. Visitors can find meaning and purpose. Hawaiʻi is not a destination but a place to forge sincere connections. Here you can explore tradition, passed down through the generations. And boy, will it enrich you! 

As if these bromides weren’t enough, HTA seals it up in a package of “mindfulness.” For those on a quest for restoration, reflection and well-being, the campaign suggests, they will find it on the soft shores, in the lush mountains of the 50th state, all planned with the help of an AI assistant called “Your Personal Aloha.”

Ideas showcases stories, opinion and analysis about Hawaiʻi, from the state’s sharpest thinkers, to stretch our collective thinking about a problem or an issue. Email news@civilbeat.org to submit an idea or an essay.

Read More

Having grown up in Hawaiʻi, I’ve learned not to have high expectations of those who manage tourism—the HTA being no exception. Gov. Josh Green notably described it as “a hot mess” on Hawaii News Now in May, pointing to infighting and leadership turnover. 

Yet “The People. The Place. The Hawaiian Islands” feels like a low point. It is, by my take, entirely at odds with the acute reality of people living in Hawaiʻi and completely indifferent to issues of unaffordability, a lack of access to healthcare, poor infrastructure and the increasing burden of disaster recovery driven by the climate crisis.

And the serenity schtick? That cuts a deep and ironic wound, given the lack of mental healthcare for many Hawaiʻi residents. Mindfulness? Inner balance? Ask the ER nurse, the public high school teacher, the resort cleaner changing bedsheets. You’re sure to get something between a puzzled look and a chuckle of resignation. 

In all fairness, the campaign—and HTA’s website—does include talk of responsible tourism, championing and preserving Hawaiian culture and ensuring community benefit. Yet this comes off as pro forma rhetoric that doesn’t square with how the campaign has been implemented. 

The AI assistant is a good example. Ask it for sustainable things to do on Oʻahu and its top suggestion is a water ski excursion. Put in “voluntourism,” one of HTA’s priorities, and it proposes Waikīkī Beach water skiing, Maui water ski tours, Kauai Lagoons skiing and two other ideas linked to this particularly unsustainable and vexing activity. 

The query “Hawaiian culture” does yield results more aligned with HTA’s stated aims. Yet the ideas are generic. The top result? Simply “Learn about Hawaiian culture.”

The “Your Personal Aloha” AI feels much more like a gateway to selling travel packages than a meaningful tool. These packages, which pop up once you’ve asked the AI for ideas, also feel out of step with what HTA says it believes. The first one I get is called the 14-day Hawaiian Luxury Escape, a nearly $11,000 per person trip of island hopping, beaches, fine dining, spa treatments, boat tours and hiking, all while relaxing in five-star hotels. 

Admittedly, this represents one region of HTA’s marketing. The packages I saw also were likely linked to my French IP address and not necessarily what a Korean or Canadian would be pitched. Yet HTA’s strategy documents for Japan, China, the continental United States, Korea and Canada echo the one for Europe. If the aim is largely identical, can we really expect the implementation to differ?

At the end of November, the Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism released new tourism data.  For the first ten months of 2025, visitor levels were basically flat compared to the same period in 2024. There was, however, a meaningful 5% jump in spending. 

Does HTA deserve credit for this rise? Is its strategy working? My suspicion—despite a friendly article from a local journalist writing for SFGate—is that something else is at play.

As we all know, prices for just about everything in Hawaiʻi have soared in recent years. Between 2021 and 2024, there were notable increases in the cost of food at grocery stores and restaurants and the average price of hotel rooms, now a whopping $360.  These changes present a more plausible explanation.

At the peak of Covid, when Hawaiʻi was largely closed off to visitors, policymakers talked a hopeful game about how this was the time for a great tourism reset. We have a rare opportunity to instill equity and sustainability in the tourism business, they told us.

HTA’s leaders made lofty statements, too, promoting “regenerative tourism” and claiming that now was a time to “rebuild, redefine and reset.”  In 2020, Kalani Kaʻanāʻanā, then a senior HTA staffer, told Ka Wai Ola that Covid had “given us time to dream again.”

So, what happened? My hunch is that it boils down to money and political will. By many indicators, Hawaiʻi’s economy—and the American economy at large—bounced back with more ferocity than analysts predicted. Once again, the treasure chests of hotels, resorts, and above all the state began to fill. And as the money whirred in, political motivation for real change whisked out.

Churn among HTA’s executives only intensified the troubles. The turnover meant that the body’s vision shifted under each administration. Since March, it has been under the new, if interim, leadership of Caroline Anderson.

I asked HTA for a comment. In a written statement, Anderson emphasized that the HTA’s focus is on “visitors who stay longer, support local businesses and are willing to invest in experiences that honor Hawai‘i’s culture and environment.”

“Some of them have higher incomes,” she wrote through a spokesperson, “but the goal is not to create an exclusive destination for the wealthy.” She added that Hawaiʻi has long been a place where middle-class families come to celebrate major life moments. “We want that to continue.”

When it comes to the global tourism campaign, Anderson wrote, “We don’t underestimate or dismiss the pressures that Hawai‘i residents are facing,” adding that the campaign is not meant to gloss over those challenges. Instead, it aims to attract “people who are looking for more meaningful, reflective trips and who tend to be more respectful of local cultures and communities.”

As for the big tourism reset HTA promised during Covid, she wrote that it’s “happening at a much deeper level,” noting changes in HTA’s strategic plan, Destination Management Action Plans, staffing and accountability.

“The campaigns still show the Hawai‘i people recognize, but the way we plan and manage tourism is very different from the pre-pandemic model,” she added.

As with so many people with close links to Hawaiʻi, I had high hopes that Covid would be a crossroads. It was not.

Then, when fire devastated Lahaina, I hoped calls for us to rethink how tourism works would get traction. They did not. 

In so many ways, we’re back where we were, where we’ve been for decades. And to my disappointment, HTA, Hawaiʻi’s most influential tourism body, carries a vision that feels empty and out of touch with what the community so desperately wants. Its “fewer tourists, more spending” idea hits my ear as PR sophistry. It’s the same playbook that corporations use to redirect our attention to niche fixes that leave the root problem untouched.

UPDATE: This column has been updated to include a response from HTA.