Tony and Fronda Harris of Hilo were flying to Brisbane, Australia, for a friend’s wedding.
Maui residents Jason Bennie and his wife and daughter were returning to his homeland to visit family.
And Hilo’s Keegan Maple, a pilot with the Air Force, was on his way back to his base in Australia.
They were among the 84 passengers on Hawaiian Airlines’ inaugural nine-hour, 15-minute flight to Brisbane, which took off from Honolulu Airport on Tuesday morning. The return flight from Brisbane is scheduled to arrive this morning with the 264-seat Boeing 767-300ER aircraft nearly filled to capacity.
The flight marked another milestone for Hawaiian, which since November 2010 has added four routes to Japan, one to South Korea, one to New York and now this one to Australia.
Next stop is Auckland, New Zealand, in March.
"It’s not so much that we’re going one region sequentially after another," Hawaiian Chief Commercial Officer Peter Ingram said. "What we’ve really been doing is looking at the opportunities where we think visitors are going to be coming to Hawaii over the long term."
The launch of three-flights-a-week service to Brisbane marked Hawaiian’s second foray into Australia, after its debut to Sydney in May 2004. That route, which initially was offered four times a week, has since grown to daily service.
Hawaiian is the only airline to offer nonstop service to the islands from Brisbane, the third-largest city in Australia, with a population of 2 million.
In February, 2-year-old Air Australia abruptly ceased operations, ending just two months of twice-a-week service to Honolulu from both Brisbane and Melbourne. Air Australia subsequently liquidated.
The renewed service linking Brisbane and Honolulu will add 41,184 new air seats to the Hawaii market annually and generate an estimated $79 million in visitor spending and $8.6 million in tax revenue for the state, according to the Hawaii Tourism Authority.
"This is tremendous news for our Asia-Pacific strategy," Lt. Gov. Brian Schatz said at the send-off, complete with hula dancers, Hawaiian music and a maile lei.
"It’s a bold step on the part of Hawaiian Airlines, and it demonstrates their confidence in the potential that Australia holds for the Hawaii tourism market," Schatz said.
In 2003, before Hawaiian flew to Australia, there were 78,191 arrivals to Hawaii from Australia, according to HTA. Through the first three quarters of this year, there were 181,353 visitors from Down Under, up 31.9 percent from the same period in 2011. And HTA projects for full-year 2012 that Australian visitors to Hawaii will reach 240,000.
"The friendliness, weather and the climate reminds them a lot of some of the tropical parts of Australia," said John Leonardi, deputy consul general and consul for the Australian Consulate-General. "I’m sure being part of the United States and being a relatively safe destination is also part of (why they come to Hawaii). Obviously, the Hawaiian brand is well known throughout the world and, obviously, in Australia."
Likewise, the Great Barrier Reef and tourist-oriented Gold Coast are among the features appealing to Hawaii residents traveling to Brisbane.
The Harrises, who own an online beauty school, said they were going to Brisbane to attend the wedding of a former Hilo High School athletic director.
"We’ll spend the first four or five days with our friend, and after that we’re going to wing it," Fronda Harris said. "We’re almost at our 25th wedding anniversary, and we’re going to have fun, just play."
Bennie, who was born in Australia, says he will enjoy not having to make a stop on the way to Brisbane.
"Normally you’d have to go through Sydney and transfer and spend the night," he said. "This saves you time and a whole night in a hotel. It just makes it a lot easier to get to the northern part of Australia compared to before. Australia’s so big that before it was like flying to Vancouver via San Diego."
Maple, of Hilo, is in the U.S. Air Force but stationed in Brisbane, where he flies with the Royal Australian Air Force.
"This flight is perfect for me because I can fly directly from home to my work in Australia," he said.
To commemorate the inaugural flight, Hawaiian placed on the cockpit window an image of the Southern Cross, the first aircraft to fly from Hawaii to Brisbane. In June 1928, the year before Hawaiian was founded, Australian aviation pioneers Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm flew the tri-engine Fokker monoplane from Kauai to Brisbane’s Eagle Farm airfield over a span of 83 hours, stopping en route in Fiji for the pilots to take a one-day break. The flight originated in Oakland, Calif.
Hawaiian, which has five new A330-200s coming into the fleet next year and three Boeing 767s being retired, plans to keep expanding.
"We have a list all the time of destinations that are ripe for service and, at any given point in time, that can change based on competition and based on economic factors," Ingram said. "When we’ve got the availability to add a new flight, we see what’s at the top, and we just take that one."
Ingram said Hawaiian plans to announce "in the near term" another new route for later in 2013 and hinted that it likely will be abroad.
"We’ve got a lot of competition from the West Coast to Hawaii right now," he said. "I’ll make no guarantees what the next route will be, but we still think there’s plenty of room for international expansion."
China figures to be high on the list.
"We’re certainly interested in (Hawaiian) taking a hard look at Taiwan as well as Beijing or Shanghai," Schatz said. "Those are our next few targets. I think discussions are under way (regarding Taiwan), and the visa waiver approved by President Obama (last month) paves the way for that possibility. But our role is to encourage all the carriers to add as many flights as possible, with the understanding that after the flights are added, we’ve got to provide the marketing push to try to fill those seats."
Ingram acknowledged that China is under consideration.
"China is something we’re looking closely at," Ingram said. "We’ve opened sales offices in China (in Shanghai and Beijing) to begin selling our product on a connecting basis. We’re connecting a lot of passengers today over our Seoul, Korea-Incheon flight. Sometimes we connect them on our Fukuoka (Japan) flight. Sometimes we carry them on our Hawaii-to-the-West Coast flight. So we’re generating millions of dollars in revenue from China today even without direct service."
Ingram said Taiwan is "an interesting opportunity" because of the visa waiver.
"With a visa waiver it’s much easier for local Taiwanese to be able to travel to the United States," he said. "We saw a significant jump — almost 100 percent in visitors — from Korea to Hawaii after Korea got the visa waiver. So there’s that potential for Taiwan, and those are the sorts of things that go into our evaluation of new route opportunities."
