Hawaiian Air hires exec
to promote conventions

By Russ Lynch
Star-Bulletin

Janet Yoshida Brown, the first sales director for the Hawaii Convention Center, will join Hawaiian Airlines Inc. Oct. 6 but she will keep on selling conventions.

Paul Casey, Hawaiian's president and chief executive officer, said the airline needs to promote conventions to help both its interisland and mainland-Hawaii business.

Brown joined the Convention Center Authority in the summer of 1994, a year before ground was broken for the $350 million project.

In January 1996 she moved to what was then the Hawaii Visitors Bureau as director of sales in its marketing, conventions and incentives department.

(The bureau was later renamed the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau.)

The HVCB's convention marketing division is headed by Sandra Butler-Moreno, vice president.

So far there are 30 conventions booked for the new center, which will be completed next month and formally open for business in mid-1998.

Casey, who was president of the HVCB for nearly two years before joining Hawaiian Airlines in April, told reporters yesterday that any increase in convention business can mean new business for the interisland airlines.

Bringing reporters up to date on his five months as the head of Hawaiian, Casey said the convention center is intended to fill hotel rooms in off-peak tourist periods.

One side effect, he said, will be to encourage tourists to go to the neighbor islands when conventions occasionally block out Waikiki hotels.

On other subjects Casey said:

Hawaiian and its competitor Aloha Airlines are losing interisland business because of the increasing tendency for airlines to fly direct to the neighbor islands from the mainland and Japan.

As that increases, Hawaiian will build its own mainland-neighbor island direct services.

The HVCB should have a direct and dedicated source of funding, perhaps a percentage of the hotel room tax or part of the general excise tax, so it doesn't have to beg the Legislature every year for funding.

When it has the funding, the HVCB should be left alone to use its own marketing expertise and should not be told to spend its money on specific promotions mandated by the state.