Pleasant Hawaiian Holidays
will book extra trips with
Hawaiian Air

By Russ Lynch
Star-Bulletin

Watching its mainland-Hawaii bookings steadily rise, Pleasant Hawaiian Holidays has worked out a deal with Hawaiian Airlines Inc. to provide daily scheduled airline service to Honolulu from Seattle and Portland, starting in mid-May.

The company said yesterday that it will also be able to put its customers aboard Hawaiian's direct Seattle-Maui service, set to start in November and run into April 1999.

Pleasant Hawaiian currently flies two scheduled flights a week from Seattle to Honolulu, on Saturdays and Sundays, using 216-seat Boeing 757 aircraft chartered from American Trans Air.

Now Pleasant is booking blocks of seats on Hawaiian's 304-seat DC-10s as well, bringing the service to daily. It is also doing that for Hawaiian flights out of Portland, where it has no service of its own.

"Although our present program has been very successful, we determined that we needed to provide daily departures to meet the growing needs of the Seattle and Portland markets," said Ed Hogan, chairman and chief executive officer, who founded Pleasant Hawaiian in the late 1950s.

Pleasant Hawaiian, the biggest booker of mainland travelers to Hawaii with more than 350,000 customers in 1997, said its overall bookings for the first quarter of 1998 are up 17 percent from the equivalent period of 1997.

"There are a lot of good opportunities here," said Ken Phillips, a spokesman at Pleasant's Westlake Village, Calif., headquarters.

In addition to its traditional markets in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas, Pleasant has been tapping the Pacific Northwest for Hawaii business for some years.

The market is growing and Hawaiian is also keen to market it, Phillips said.

Keoni Wagner, a spokesman for Hawaiian Airlines, agreed. "Traffic out of the Northwest is strong," he said.

Pleasant Hawaiian said it has 250,000 seats a year into Hawaii from the mainland, combining its charter of American Trans Air planes with what it can book on Hawaiian.

The chartered flights, using ATA crews and planes which have been repainted with Pleasant Hawaiian's logo, run daily from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Maui and on to Honolulu.

For the spring-summer schedule, starting in May, there will be five or six more flights a week from each of the two big mainland gateways, going direct to Honolulu, Phillips said.

Recent Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau figures showed a 10.8 percent increase in arrivals from the mainland in 1997 compared with 1996, capped by five straight months of increases.

Hawaii's total picture this year, however, is up against a dip in travel from Asia, caused largely by regional financial woes.

The HVCB says the best that can be expected is a flat year for overall tourism in 1998 but the strong growth in the mainland markets is a strong counter to the Asia-Pacific downturn.

The HVCB's figures show that while still small in the overall picture, Pacific Northwest tourist arrivals are among the growth leaders for Hawaii. Washington and Oregon together produced 375,770 Hawaii tourists last year, 9.1 percent more than 344,330 in 1996.

By comparison, tourist arrivals from California were up only 2 percent. Still, California produced 1.28 million Hawaii tourists in 1997, well over three times the number from Washington and Oregon.