The state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism has restored passenger counts from international and domestic travelers, correcting at least part of the blip in data caused by the pilot program for a digitized agriculture disclosure form.
Eliminating the optional tourism questions on the back of the form for the Akamai Arrival pilot program, which runs from March 1 to May 31, initially caused the department to remove its daily passenger counts, a
real-time measuring tool that has been available since Sept. 11, 2001.
Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke
told the Honolulu Star-
Advertiser that the optional tourism questions on the back of the printed agricultural form were left off the digitized version to better measure compliance. She said officials chose a simplified form as they were worried that adding the more time-consuming tourism questions might skew the pilot’s participation rate. Luke said the optional tourism questions currently have about a 40% compliance rate.
Jennifer Chun, DBEDT director of tourism research, estimates that the pilot eliminates tourism questions from all arriving Southwest flights, all American flights, five Alaska flights, one Delta flight, two Hawaiian flights and two United flights — roughly 31% of scheduled flights and 28.4% of
scheduled air seats.
DBEDT Director James Kunane Tokioka said the agency received complaints after the pilot began March 1 and the agency removed daily passenger counts from its website. Tokioka said recently that DBEDT’s Research and Economic Analysis Division restored the international passenger counts as of
May 1, and on May 5 resumed the reporting of domestic data, albeit with a one-week delay.
“The Department of Agriculture is now providing DBEDT with the daily passenger data on a weekly basis, and we are currently working with DOA on a memorandum of understanding to receive and report the data on a daily basis,” he said in an email to the Star-Advertiser. “Once the MOU is approved, we will report the data at the same schedule as we have been using in the past.”
The initiative was authorized under Act 196 and has been touted by state leaders, including Gov. Josh Green, Luke and Sen. Glenn Wakai (D, Kalihi-Salt Lake-Pearl Harbor) as a
significant step toward modernizing Hawaii’s biosecurity efforts.
Wakai, who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Intergovernmental Affairs, said he started advocating for a digital agricultural form five years ago and initially was met with resistance, until 2024 when lawmakers passed a law encouraging the migration from paper to an app.
He said ending the in-flight paper agricultural form would save at least $800,000 annually, but more important, digitization increases completion rates and strengthens protections against invasive species. Passengers typically would complete the digitized form in advance of boarding their flight.
But the initial data gap from the pilot left economists and tourism research professionals stumped on how to get enough nuanced information to calculate year-over-year comparisons for the monthly visitor arrivals and spending reports. They criticized the decision to discontinue the existing methodology, instead of temporarily running both programs in parallel so as to benchmark against the pre-existing methodology.
Tokioka said DBEDT is now receiving data from the Akamai Arrival Program, so “all the data are comparable to the past and the comparisons are valid.”
He said DBEDT is planning for the future when the Plants and Animals Declaration Form becomes 100% digital.
Once that occurs, Tokioka said, “DBEDT has two options to collect the domestic visitor data: (1) switch domestic visitor data collection to an airport departure survey; (2) digitize the tourism survey form.”
DBEDT is planning a
pilot program to test the
effectiveness of the two methods.
