Visitor arrivals to Hawaii declined 99.5% in April, tourism recovery still far out

Only 4,564 visitors traveled to Hawaii last month, according to preliminary statistics released today by the Hawaii Tourism Authority.

That’s a 99.5% drop compared to a year ago when 856,250 visitors came by air and cruise ship. HTA did not provide a spending estimate for this April’s visitors, but it would have been minuscule compared to the $1.3 billion that visitors to Hawaii spent in April 2019.

The decline was due to COVID-19 fears and tourism lockdowns. Nearly all trans-Pacific flights to Hawaii were canceled after the state instituted a mandatory 14-day self-quarantine for incoming out-of-state passengers on March 26, which was extended to the interislands on April 1. Both quarantines are currently in effect through June 30.

Trans-Pacific air seats to Hawaii fell to 95,985, a 91.4% drop from April 2019. No seats were scheduled from Oceania and Canada and there were very few seats scheduled for other markets.

Also, a “no sail order” on all cruise ships, which was instituted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is slated to run through late July 2020.

Most of the visitors, some 3,016, that came to Hawaii in April were from the state’s core U.S. West market. Another 1,299 visitors came from the state’s second-largest tourism source market the U.S. East. Only 13 visitors came from Japan, Hawaii’s top international market, and nine from the mature Canadian market. Some 298 visitors came from the category called all other international markets, which includes all non-U.S. markets outside of Japan and Canada.

During the first four months of this year, Hawaii’s visitor industry only welcomed 2.1 million visitors, a 37% drop from the same period in 2019.

Assuming the visitor industry will start opening in September, state economist Eugene Tian has forecast Hawaii will welcome 3.4 million visitors in 2020, a decrease of 67.5% from the 2019 level.

If that proves correct, it means that over the next eight months only another 1.3 million more visitors are expected to come to Hawaii.

Tian said he expects September 2020 will only recover 30% of arrivals from September 2019 and by December Hawaii will have recovered only 45% of the December 2019 arrivals. He doesn’t expect any cruise arrivals until the second half of next year.

“It will take six years for visitor arrivals to recover to the 2019 level; this is based on the 2009 Great Recession pace,” he said.

Tian’s forecast assumes visitor arrivals will only increase to 6.2 million in 2021, 8.3 million in 2022, and 9.4 million in 2023. Visitor arrivals will not reach the 2019 level until 2025, based on his assumptions.