Hawaii News Now- More debate over Koa Ridge housing development
- Police searching for missing Hilo girl
- Cheap Eats: Kunia Chinese Restaurant
- Hawaii unemployment: 6.9% statewide, worse on neighbor islands
- Hawaii Girl Scouts recall cookies
- Wanted Wednesday: Leon Lopes
- Hawaii helps craft new road map for public education
- Colleen Hanabusa makes U.S. House run official
- Wind picking up roofs and bending power poles
- Sharks hamper search for California man who vanished while surfing
Aug
30
It is appropriate for the kickoff of fall football season that Hawaii tourism marketers can sum up their strategy for increasing fall visitor bookings in two words: the blitz.
Hotel, airline, attraction and other marketers are running around California this week to get more West Coasties to come at us through the air with the goal of interrupting their recession with a nice vacation in Paradise.
“There’s great demand still, but motivating people in these times is difficult,” says John Monahan, head of the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau, which is the North American marketing contractor for the Hawaii Tourism Authority.
There will be singing and dancing and cooking and briefings for travel agents and contests for radio stations and free trips for bloggers and anything else they can think of, targeted at this subset of Californians: those who have secure enough jobs that they can afford such a visit, and who are already sold on Hawaii.
These are people who intend to come here sometime, and can afford to come here anytime, so the pitch is: for the love of God do it now, because we need your business and prices will never be lower.
Monahan’s deputy Jay Talwar uses the term “productive visitor” to describe the visitors we want most, who spend more money on spas, golf, tours and other attractions, and hence have more positive impact on our economy.
“Those who plop and drop on the beach eventually find a beach that’s closer and cheaper,” Talwar explains. “Those who really get into Hawaii are more likely to be satisfied.”
Months ago, public and private tourism marketers did the blitz in San Francisco. Not only did it produce a measurable bump in bookings right away, but traffic from the San Francisco Bay area has been a little bit better ever since.
The Los Angeles blitz underway this week is the most coordinated marketing strategy Hawaii has ever done. And there are signs that rival destinations are eyeing it closely with a view to trying the same thing, hence the continuing focus on Hawaii’s beauty, diversity and aloha, the better to offer something that is not to be had for any price in Cancun, Cabo or the Caribbean.
Not only domestic visitors are being sought with this approach. Kristine Klein, discussing European tourism marketing efforts, says, “Europeans don’t just want to relax, they want an experience.” And it had better be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, because the travel time to Hawaii from Frankfurt or London is roughly 24 hours.
Hawaii is actually doing pretty well compared to most tourist destinations. South Korean outbound travel is down 32% but to Hawaii it’s up 9.7%. Hawaiian Airlines has an expanding codeshare deal with Korea Airlines that includes a neighbor island trip, and it is doing a similar piggyback to put more butts in seats on its own service here from Sydney.
Tourism marketers are hoping for a September bump from Japan due to a first-time cluster of holidays that allows Japanese consumers to take a week off without taking too much leave. ANA is laying on some extra flights, too.
Citic Bank of China has launched a credit card that accrues points toward a Hawaiian vacation, and China has lifted some swine flu-related travel restrictions that had been discouraging travel in both directions. Hainan Air, which has applied for permission to fly between Beijing and Honolulu, expects approval in September.
Hawaii tourism officials say they will be surprised if China arrivals in Hawaii do not include next year by at least 20%.
Aug
28
Austal Ltd., the Australian shipbuilder that constructed the Superferry, has posted a profit of only $9 million on $500 million revenue for the first half of 2009, because it wrote off $30 million it lent to Hawaii Superferry.
Austal CEO Bob Browning, interviewed by someone who was busting his chops about the weeny profit, justified the investment in Superferry by saying it enabled the company to build a shipyard in the United States, which in turn allows it to compete for U.S. defense contracts.
The interviewer was in Australia and was focused on the 82% plunge in profits, not exposing anything about Superferry. Browning was focused on explaining that the Superferry project led to other business, thus minimizing the loan loss.
Browning is himself an American and joined the company as head of the Mobile, Ala., shipyard, but now runs the entire company.
I mention all this because Superferry critics continue to portray all military connections to the project as suspicious. I would portray it as an example of something which isn’t nefarious but is mildly interesting – reverse dual use.
Austal took a private sector contract with the hope of later winning defense contracts. Dual use usually works the other way around. Hawaii technology companies, including Oceanit, Hoana Medical and Tissue Genesis, seek defense contracts to fund research and development, then look for civilian markets for the same technology. That’s dual use.
In the shipbuilding industry, the big money for smaller ships is from military contracts, but the Jones Act prevents foreign shipbuilders from chasing such contracts unless they build or acquire a shipyard in the United States. Austal lent money to Superferry to help the company get started, took the contract to build its first two catamaran ferries, and set up the U.S. shipyard it needed to win other U.S. business.
Aug
28
From “Terminator” to the remake of “Cape Fear,” movies are jammed with monsters and bad guys who, not having been entirely killed, emerge from the water or climb over a railing and we’re all on the run again. So it is with the state budget crisis.
On Friday morning HGEA revealed that Governor Lingle has sent over a new proposal that contained a little give on furloughs and layoffs, so the union decided to send back a counteroffer that also contained a little give. Both sides had been toning down their rhetoric of late and it is a fact that the new proposals narrowed the gap between their various stands on employees sharing the pain of lower tax revenues.
By Friday afternoon the specter of confrontation and crisis was back, with the governor saying her hopes of conciliation were dashed after she read the counteroffer. Lingle called her cabinet into emergency session over the weekend to do another round of spending cuts, possibly including another round of outright layoffs.
It’s a horror movie in which the monster keeps coming back as screaming taxpayers run away from the swamp.
A union counteroffer that falls short of closing the budget gap is not, in and of itself, sufficient reason to gnash the gubernatorial teeth. It is the essence of bargaining that no offer is practical until the last one, the one that is accepted by both sides.
To evaluate offers at this point in the process, when each side is presumably asking for more than it expects to get in the end, each side must consider the trickier and more subjective criterion of whether the other side’s latest proposal is close enough to a settlement that you can see it from here.
If the governor’s people know what they’re doing and don’t have unreasonable expectations, their dismay at the new union counteroffer suggests that they think HGEA is still angling for binding arbitration in the hope of getting a better deal from the arbitrator.
What we know for certain is that the governor has responded to HGEA’s newest proposal, and to the still-lower revenue estimate from the Council on Revenues, by calling her lieutenants into a weekend meeting to figure out where they’re going to cut next.
I often call out people who I think are holding their breath until the rest of us turn blue, that is, artificially amplifying a crisis to show everyone it was a bad idea not to treat them better. But in this case, it is hard to see how any governor of any political stripe could do anything different from what Linda Lingle is doing. Tax revenues are still way below pre-recession rates and the state government is overspending its revenues even after several different kinds of spending cuts.
You should know that I have heard whispers from the union side that suggest the state government negotiators have been high-handed with them and sometimes didn’t seem all that interested in real bargaining. Maybe a different approach in June could have led to a holding hands approach to furloughs that would have prevented all the legal wrangling. But even if that’s the case, the situation both sides face now is a still-deepening state budget deficit that is likely to force more layoffs than if all of this had been resolved early in the summer. Maybe it just wasn’t possible, but it’s too bad.
