How many visitors is too many before Oahu hits a tipping point?
Tourism officials have been trying to figure that out since 2019, when statewide visitor arrivals topped 10.4 million — nearly 6.2 million of them on Oahu. Complaints about the strain of tourism on Hawaii’s natural resources rose, and the grumbling continued even during the pandemic plunge in 2020, which caused more than a 69% percent reduction in Oahu visitor days (the amount of time that visitors spent on the island).
Based on popular theory, the absence of visitors should have caused a corresponding drop in Oahu’s electricity, water, solid waste and sewer consumption.
But it didn’t, according to new research from state Chief Economist Eugene Tian, who recently analyzed data from Hawaiian Electric Co., the Honolulu Board of Water Supply and the city Department of Environmental Services, which manages Oahu’s wastewater and solid waste systems.
Tian, of the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, said he was surprised to find that “the impact of tourism on Oahu’s natural resource (sensitivity) is minimal.”
Based on the Oahu numbers, Tian extrapolated that if tourism were completely shut down in the state, statewide electricity sales in terms of dollars would decrease by only 14.7%, while water charges would only decrease by 10.7%.
Tian described the data as a first look. He was able to separate hotel data from residential data, but did not have the ability to separate other lodging such as timeshares and vacation rentals.
While vacation rentals have been growing in popularity, Tian said they have a much smaller footprint than hotels. So he said its likely even if they had been included that his findings would not have substantially changed, especially since “the change in consumption is not sensitive to the change in visitors.”
According to Tian’s analysis, if visitor days decrease by 1%, electricity and water consumption will decrease by less than 0.2%.
“In other words, when we decrease visitor arrivals and thus visitor days, the savings on electricity and water are small,” he said, adding that it was close to zero for sewer and solid waste.
Tian said a reason that hotel utility consumption in 2020 didn’t drop as dramatically as the visitor count was because a fixed cost for common area usage occurred even when properties were shut down.
On the flip side, Tian said electricity consumption in the residential sector increased by 6.2% in 2020 as compared to 2019.
Tian completed his preliminary analysis at the request of state Sen. Glenn Wakai (D-Kalihi-Salt Lake-Aliamanu), who heads the Senate Committee on Energy, Economic Development, Tourism & Technology.
Wakai said he wanted to have the information in advance of the next state legislative session to help determine how much of a factor limiting tourism arrivals should play in tourism management policy-making.
The top priority in Hawaii Tourism Authority’s Oahu Destination Management Action Plan, which HTA’s board of directors approved July 29, is “decreasing the total number of visitors to Oahu to a manageable level by controlling the number of visitor accommodations and exploring changes to land use, zoning and airport policies.”
But so far, Wakai said he hasn’t seen any entity that has been able to define how much Oahu tourism arrivals must drop to improve conditions.
“We’ve been talking for more than a year now about better management of tourism. … People are fixated on a 10 million number,” Wakai said. “Then when we move off the 10 million number those that kind of have the anti-tourism sentiment start talking about carrying capacity and, ‘Oh My God these tourists they are taking too much electricity, drinking too much water using the bathroom too much and littering our shores.’
“That’s all conjecture, all anecdotal, so I thought why don’t we get some beginnings of some real data on that.”
There’s a lot at stake in the outcome of these discussions, especially when the state economy strongly depends on tourism, and the state has made recent investments that would allow Hawaii’s airports, harbors and rental car facilities to handle more visitors.
Tian said if tourism drops by 10% natural resource impacts would be minimal, but the economic hardships would be greater.
“The overall contribution for Oahu tourism is about 16% in jobs in 2019 and 11.8% in 2020,” Tian said. “So this number compared with the visitor consumption in electricity and the consumption in water — the economic contribution is higher.”
Wakai said these findings show why the state must be very sensitive to its visitor-dependent economy.
“When the tourists don’t come, people are unemployed,” he said. “They stay home and locals start gobbling up all our natural resources and adding to our sewage treatment plants. So we should actually be inviting more tourists so people are staying at work instead of at home in their air- conditioned rooms watching Netflix all day.”
Wakai opined that Tian’s findings suggest that Oahu might have greater carrying capacity for tourism than previously thought — as long as tourism is managed so that the visitors don’t frequent hot spots on the same date and time.
Some would argue that the entirety of Oahu suffers from overtourism, which has been exacerbated in recent years as vacation rentals eliminated the de facto cap on tourism growth that was tied to the challenge of building new hotels or adding additional rooms.
The extent of overtourism on Oahu is debatable, and Tian’s new research is just another talking point in an increasingly nuanced discussion that is not limited to utility consumption.
Certainly one only has to go to popular places like Laniakea Beach or neighborhoods like Lanikai for proof that overtourism exists in certain pockets of Oahu, especially during peak visiting times.
It was once like that at Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve, said Laura Thielen, director of the Honolulu Department of Parks and Recreation, who is a former state senator and director of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, and recently participated in HTA’s Oahu Destination Management Action Plan.
Hanauma Bay was designated as the state’s first Marine Life Conservation District in 1967 and by the 1970s and 1980s attendance had peaked to upwards of 10,000 people a day.
“I remember coming here,” Thielen said Friday as she viewed the quiet crescent-shaped bay from a picnic table underneath a shady tree. “People were parked everywhere. There were fights going on in the parking lot over stalls. It was unreal. You could drive down (to the beach).”
Nate Serota, city Parks and Recreation spokesman, said it wasn’t until the 1990s that the city instituted a management plan at Hanauma Bay to reduce visitation and improve the facilities. It also banned feeding fish, and focused on emphasizing education.
Hanauma Bay has been lauded as an example of successful tourism management. Still, Thielen said the conservation gains that a pandemic-related reduction in visitation brought to the bay are encouraging and prove that there is room for improvement.
In 2019, Hanauma Bay hosted an average of about 3,000 people each day it was open. After its pandemic-related closure in 2020, Serota said researchers noted larger fish and the continued increase in monk seal activity within clearer ocean waters.
The city increased Hanauma Bay’s entrance fees from $7.50 to $12 in October 2020 and then in July increased them to $25, while keeping it free for local residents and kids 12 and under.
Thielen said average daily visitation now is about 1,500, and there is not an immediate plan to increase visitation back to pre-pandemic levels.
“As long as we can continue to operate that way and we can generate the revenue, I think the managed destination at this level is better than the way it was,” she said. “The quality for the visitors is improved.”
The city controls visitation through an online reservation system that it built in-house and launched April 26. The city has limited walk-in spots for visitors to 300 per day, so most must make reservations.
Residents are allowed to walk into Hanauma Bay from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. However, Thielen said she hopes to expand those hours for residents sometime next month after the city adds a fee structure to its reservation system, which is expected to provide a more accurate daily head count.
In addition to using admission controls to safeguard Hanauma Bay, Thielen said the city hopes to add more on-land experiences that preserve the pristine marine ecosystem by cutting down on the time that people are in the water.
A short educational video already teaches residents and visitors how to be stewards of Hanauma Bay, but Thielen wants to put Hanauma Bay’s educational program out to bid with the hope that the new contract will allow for more interactive exhibits, and expand partnerships with the city’s Summer Fun program for children.
“There may be opportunities to add things through improvements like a coral tank that provide additional understanding and have people connect with things that they can do in their daily life that would help the ocean resources,” she said.
Thielen said the city also is getting ready to put Hanauma Bay’s concessions out to bid. Ideally, she said the process would add food choices that are more attractive to people and new experiences such as a paid evening dinner and story-telling event after the bay is closed.
“We’ve often heard people talking about ‘We don’t want more tourists, we want higher spending tourists,’ so is there value that we could provide here up top that generates additional revenue without adding to the impacts to the bay?” Thielen asked.
BY THE NUMBERS
Theoretically, the impact of a 10% reduction in visitors to Oahu on electricity and water consumption based on data from 2019.
6,154,248
Total Oahu visitor arrivals
615,425
10% decrease in visitors
15,233,099
Electricity savings a year (KwH)
0.23%
Total electricity savings
61 million
Gallons of water saved
0.13%
Total water savings
Source: DBEDT
