Hawaii tourism
is back on trackVisitor industry jobs throughout
the islands are rising at a pace
to match pre-9/11 days
Employment in Hawaii's key tourism industry is rising at a pace to match the pre-9/11 boom.
Jobs in hotels, restaurants and other businesses driven by the vital tourism industry are approaching an all-time high.
At Waikiki hotels, overtime is now more common than layoffs.
Yet, unions and some businesses that cater to tourists say not all jobs are back and many are not what they used to be.
Nevertheless, visitor numbers are up, unemployment is down and the number of Japanese planning to travel during their holidays later this month is up for the first time in four years.
The latest figures analyzed by The Associated Press nationwide show Hawaii's total just 600 jobs short of the August 1991 peak, when there were 101,900 jobs in the leisure-hospitality sector.
"The snapback was much faster and stronger than anybody anticipated," said Ted Liu, director of the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.
Just a few months ago, he said, the industry was still shuddering from the effects of the SARS scare, the Iraq war and the lingering impact of 9/11.
Nationally, the economy is down about 2 million jobs since early 2001. But Hawaii added 24,700 jobs between January 2001 and January of this year, 1,100 in tourism.
Hawaii's tourism sector added an additional 700 jobs in February for a total of 101,300, according to federal statistics.
March unemployment figures show just 3.8 percent of Hawaii workers are jobless. The national average is 5.7 percent.
For Outrigger Hotels & Resorts, which owns 26 hotels and condominium resorts, the past six months have been comparable to 2000, when Hawaii last enjoyed a tourism peak, said Barry Wallace, senior vice president of operations.
"It was much stronger than we've seen in many, many years," Wallace said. "We had people on more overtime than they were used to working."
The islands had a robust economy in early 1991 even as the rest of the nation slipped into a recession. But then the island economy weakened after Japan's economic bubble burst, shutting down the flow of big-spending tourists.
After nine years in the doldrums, tourism emerged in 2000 with more than 100,000 jobs by year's end. However, those numbers were already in decline by the summer of 2001, at least two months before 9/11 wiped out all gains overnight, according to economist Carl Bonham, director of the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization.
The terrorist attacks shut down travel for several days and slowed tourism to a crawl. Hawaii lost 5,100 tourism jobs during the first month alone.
The number of jobs didn't rise above 100,000 again until August 2003. In February it hit 101,300.
Despite the increase in jobs, unions say hotel jobs in Waikiki have not come back to their pre-9/11 levels, and some companies that rely on tourist dollars say they haven't had the demand to restore all the cutbacks.
"They praise the big companies for locking in the labor savings they put in place after September 11th," said Jason Ward, spokesman for the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees Local 5 union, which represents some 7,000 non- management workers at several major Waikiki hotels. "When business picked up, they're operating with fewer employees in place."
At Outrigger, which has 2,000 employees at its nonunion Outrigger and Ohana hotels in Waikiki, Wallace acknowledged that some work was reassigned and positions were eliminated.
But he also said some workers were recently called back to work full time.
But while some still have their jobs, they don't work as much.
Still, visitor numbers are up, and Bonham's latest economic forecast predicts they'll keep rising with larger numbers of Japanese.
The addition of two new interisland cruise ships also will boost the industry this year.