Hawaii Tourism Authority shifts focus to managing tourism

The message at the Hawaii Tourism Authority’s first statewide event under new leadership was more about how the agency is going to partner with the industry to manage tourism rather than its marketing plans.

The change in the event’s name from “Spring Marketing Roll Out” to “Tourism Update” signified the different focus as Hawaii heads into what has been forecast as the year arrivals could break a 10 million-visitor benchmark. If the agency’s new direction wasn’t clear by the name change, HTA President and CEO Chris Tatum’s kickoff speech Wednesday left little room for interpretation.

“Our job is not to see how many people we are getting here. It’s managing tourism,” said Tatum, who took the agency’s reins in December and is the first HTA head to come from a visitor industry background. “We need residents to be excited about the visitor industry. But it’s very important that we show them from our standpoint that the most important brand is home.”

Tourism officials, visitor industry executives and owners of small businesses from around the state listened as Tatum explained his view that the agency has a responsibility to “drive the tourism revenue so that the Legislature can do what they need to do to support the community.”

Another sign of the new focus is that HTA’s cultural affairs director and community enrichment director now report directly to Tatum. They provided updates on the agency’s cultural and community programs before Karen Hughes, HTA vice president of marketing and product development, and her marketing contractors rolled out their marketing plans.

While the event did include discussion of new marketing strategies, it was a departure from past years when HTA and its global marketing team would have used the time to make presentations on their continuing efforts to promote the Hawaiian islands.

At this time last year, HTA was battling with legislators to defend its mission and preserve its budget. This year, four state lawmakers, including Reps. Richard H.K. Onishi and Aaron Ling Johanson and Sens. Glenn Wakai and Laura Thielen, took part in a luncheon panel. Wakai and Thielen were among HTA’s harshest legislative critics during the 2018 session.

“I’m very optimistic about the future of tourism,” Wakai said. “There’s a sense of collaboration that we are all in this canoe together. I have a lot of confidence in Chris Tatum to lead the change.”

Thielen, a former director of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, thanked HTA for adopting culturally sound and environmentally friendly practices, but cautioned that those efforts would not be enough to satisfy residents who have grown increasingly critical of how the spread of tourism has impacted their lives.

Thielen said the state’s longtime goal of marketing to higher-spending visitors so that Hawaii could grow tourism through spending rather than arrivals has failed in the face of global economic forces. HTA and other tourism stakeholders need a new plan and fast, she said.

“If you think the (nearly) 10 million visitors that we hit last year is the end of the story… Venice is about the size of Oahu and they get approximately 20 million visitors a year,” she said.

The tourism-dependent European city has been in the news lately for implementing restrictions on visitors to provide some relief to overwhelmed residents.

At the rate Hawaii tourism has been growing, Thielen asked, “What is to prevent us from being at 20 million visitors by 2030 or sooner?”