Visitor numbers
still lag

An encouraging sign is that
visitors stayed longer, boosting
the totals for December

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By Russ Lynch
rlynch@starbulletin.com

Hawaii's tourist traffic in December was still lagging the previous year's, but arrivals have rebounded since the months immediately following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, state officials said today.

The count for last month was 486,871, and while that was down 16.1 percent from the 580,461 who came to the islands in the previous December, there were some bright spots, according to the state Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism's monthly report.

Visitors stayed 3.9 percent longer on average and that meant visitor days, the number of visitors multiplied by the length of stay, were off only 12.8 percent year-over-year, DBEDT said. The department called that "a significant improvement from previous months."

For all of 2001, total arrivals of 6.3 million were down 9.1 percent from 6.9 million in 2000, which had been a record year.

One positive sign was that visitors from the western states, Hawaii's main market, were above pre-Sept. 11 levels for the first time. Visitors arriving on U.S. airlines from U.S. West points last month were up 1.3 percent from the previous December.

December arrivals were down for all islands, however, with Oahu arrivals down 18.6 percent, compared to December 2000.

The continued drop in travel from Japan hits Oahu hardest because most Japanese stay on only the one island.

And a lot of Japanese still are staying home, although the decline is not as bad as it has been. Hawaii hosted 106,677 visitors from Japan last month, down 32.3 percent from 157,483 in the previous December.

"December saw the first improvement in Japanese visitor arrivals since Sept. 11," DBEDT said, as the level of decline eased from the drop of 59 percent in November.

Preliminary figures for January show the rate of decline probably is now even less than that. A count of people at airports, a rough guide because it includes returning residents as well as visitors, shows that through Tuesday of this week, the Japanese count was running about 26 percent behind the same portion of January last year.