The tourism recovery that isn ' t

For Hawaii's tourism industry, there is light at the end of the tunnel, but we're still in the tunnel. Arrivals by air are actually UP from last summer now. Honolulu this month has gotten 5,000 visitors from the mainland, offsetting 5,000 fewer Japanese visitors. Japanese arrivals, down 27% in June, are down only 5% so far this month. Domestic arrivals are up substantially to neighbor islands compared to last year. We've bottomed out. Sort of. We've bottomed out statistically, but not financially. Put it this way: we'd be in recovery already if hotel room rates were the same as last year. They're not. They're down 10% to 20% in rough figures, depending on the island and the industry tier. Overall, we'd need an extra visitor for every six we're getting for the hotels to see improvement at these rates. The gap isn't really that bad, because as hotels fill they can get away with discounting less, but the general idea is that we need more than the same number of visitors as last summer before real recovery begins.