COURTESY MOKULELE AIRLINES
In honor of the airline's new service to Kapalua, a Mokulele plane sports the resort's butterfly logo on its tail.
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Mokulele expands service to Kapalua
Mokulele Airlines is expanding its service to Maui's Kapalua resort under a new agreement with Maui Land and Pineapple Co.
The interisland carrier will add two additional aircraft to its fleet in February and March to handle expanded service to Kapalua, as well as Molokai, Kona and Honolulu.
Mokulele, which currently has five daily flights to the resort, will add two more round-trip flights from Honolulu to Kapalua five days a week in March.
In February, it will add six daily Kahului-to-Kona flights. Service will also be expanded from Honolulu, Kahului and Kona to Molokai. The airline is adding the flights to allow for easier connections to neighbor islands, said Mokulele Chief Executive Bill Boyer.
"We want to have one flight every 35 minutes everywhere we go, to make it more convenient for people to get off island and still keep the prices down," he said.
Two of the airline's six nine-seat planes have been painted with the Kapalua logo in a joint effort by Mokulele and MLP to draw more traffic to the resort, which is undergoing $500 million in redevelopment, including upgrades to the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua.
"We're very pleased with the high level of service they are providing," said Robert Webber, Maui Land and Pine's CFO and senior vice president of business development. "It's all part of a program to get more interisland traffic."
One-way prices into Kapalua will be in the mid-$40 range, Boyer said, with flights expected to cater equally to business travelers and visitors.
Mokulele, which became certified as a scheduled operator in December 2006, flies under its own name as well as go!Express, a code-share partner of Mesa Air Group Inc.'s interisland carrier go!.