Most of us make small allowances for valued guests who don’t know our household ways. And most of us accept the “rules” when we’re guests at Granny’s in Kentucky or Tutu’s on Kauai. If Tutu lays down the law about something, we tell our chafing teenagers they must obey, too.

Trouble comes only if host and guest disagree about privileges and obligations, especially if the host lacks enforcement power and nobody tells the teens to cool it.

That’s why the Hawaii Tourism Authority’s “destination management” approach now includes telling visitors about resident expectations and sensitivities. That’s why counties are restricting commercial activities at beach parks and cracking down on visitor lodging outside resort “ghettos.”

There are issues when large portions of residential neighborhoods get converted into vacation rentals. But right now the big flashpoints are probably beach parks and other coastal recreation and food-gathering areas.

That takes us to the lead conclusion in the Star-Advertiser’s Nov. 1 article, “Surveying hot spots,” that said: “Tourist visitation outpaced resident visitation in only 10 of the top 30 points statewide for both visitors and residents in September,” according to HTA’s cellphone monitoring to track who goes where. The article was about visitor vs. resident use of popular locations.

First, it’s important to get a full picture over time, not just one shoulder-season month. Visitor counts in September were 25% less than in July.

Second, real “hot spots” — with known conflict — are usually not large general areas where tourists and residents don’t compete for resources.

It really doesn’t matter if more residents with active cellphones drive down Kalakaua Avenue than visitors with active cellphones. It often doesn’t even matter if some place has a large volume of both residents and visitors.

What matters are patterns over time in regions where a large number of valued places, especially beaches, get more visitor than resident use.

For example, HTA had earlier provided data for the North Shore Community Plan update on resident-visitor percentages for nine North Shore parks/beaches. As a consultant, I checked that data for three different months of the record visitor year 2019.

For six of those beaches (led by Laniakea), daily visitor counts outpaced resident ones at all three selected times of year. None of the nine had majority resident use throughout the year. Resident interviews indicated deep frustrations about this.

But those same 2020 lockdown-era interviews also found surprise that resident-only traffic to beach parks was still generating weekend snarls, even without tourists. In fact, Oahu resident population grew four times as much as visitor counts from 2000 to 2018.

In that Nov. 1 article, economist Paul Brewbaker said the city “is using exclusionary zoning to segregate people who aren’t from here into ghettos that we call resort areas,” which he termed “bigotry” akin to banning minorities from residential areas. But keeping tourists in resort “ghettos” is “bigotry” only if we think of them as properly having all the same rights as residents — or if we blame them disproportionately for issues caused equally by them and ourselves.

On rights, visitors should be equal when they’re seen as customers, but not always when it comes to permanent housing stock or natural areas stressed by too many users. On blame, the heavy North Shore weekend traffic back in lockdown times reminds us that some of our problems come from people of all types, not just tourists.

So while we’re right to manage actual visitor impacts, we must also remember that Brewbaker would be correct about “bigotry” toward visitors only if we blame them singularly for issues generated by limited land hosting more people, period.

John M. Knox, a recently retired consultant, was prime contractor for the 2020 HTA Strategic Plan focusing on destination management and designed many resident surveys over the years on tourism issues.