How close is Southwest Airlines to offering service to Hawaii?
April 26, 2012
In the travel Hawaii industry one of the many questions I always hear that gets brought up constantly is will Southwest Airlines offer service to Hawaii. It has gotten to the point where some feel that it is an urban with people not knowing what to believe. In fact we’ve been talking about this subject for a while now on this very site. People have been talking about Southwest coming to Hawaii for years now but this week I got some insider information about whether they will be coming to Hawaii. Over the past couple of weeks Southwest Airlines has been talking to people working in the Hawaii travel industry to come work for them which can only mean that we are maybe getting closer to offering service to Hawaii. They wouldn’t be trying to hire people away from other companies now if they weren’t close. We hear they are trying to get some really good sales people to get their service started which I would guess to be soon. When Southwest enters the Hawaii travel market I expect to see some pricing wars between Southwest, Hawaiian Airline and Alaskan Airlines. Southwest will make it cheaper for people to buy airfare to Hawaii and the more seats that are sold to Hawaii the better the state of Hawaii will be since they heavily rely on travel to support their economy. If I had to guess when Southwest will be offering service to Hawaii I would say early next year. For now we will just have to wait and see what happens.
Hawaii Hotels See Strong Occupancy and Room Rates
January 9, 2012One of the easiest ways to tell how the Hawaii travel market is doing as a whole is looking at the hotel occupancy rate on all the islands. This past week the numbers for the last quarter came in and they were pretty good. The hotel occupancy rate for Hawaii was 86% full which is pretty strong numbers. The average room rate was around $300. If you look at the occupancy rate and also look at the average cost per night you can see the Hawaii travel market ended the year strong. In previous years the hotel occupancy would be high but the average night cost would be low. With the price being high and the occupancy rate also being high it shows that the Hawaii travel industry is still going strong. It should be interesting to see how we do in 2012 but many are expecting strong numbers once again as the international travel to Hawaii continues to increase with the increase of flights coming to Hawaii. If you are looking to travel to Hawaii anytime soon I recommend checking for hotel rates as soon as possible because the closer to the date of travel the higher the rates will be.
Hawaiian Air and Alaska Airlines Hawaii Airfare Deals
December 13, 2011Yesterday both Hawaiian Airlines and Alaska Airlines had airfare deals that were pretty amazing to me. Both were offering one way fares for $149 to all of the Hawaiian islands from Maui to Oahu. The prices will vary from city to city but it looks like most of the West Coast locations have these prices available. The dates to look at to get these rates are between January and March. If you are looking for great travel deals to Hawaii than check out Hawaiian and Alaska Airlines quickly before these deals sell out. If you can’t travel between January and March don’t worry as we should be seeing a lot more deals coming from the airlines as they compete with one another for your business. The next period that should be having some deals for is late April to late May. During this period Hawaiian Airlines and Delta offer discounted airfare rates as this is one of their slow periods.
We Survived APEC
November 16, 2011This past weekend was the APEC conference which had world leaders from China, Russia, Japan and the US all converging to Hawaii for meetings on ways of improving the world economy as well as other issues like the environment. For people living in Hawaii they were more concerned about the traffic APEC would cause. Due to security reasons the freeways, streets, parks and beaches were closed so it was difficult to get around for some. I will admit the traffic was bad at times but overall this was a win for Hawaii as it showed we could handle large conferences and hopefully more will be coming to Hawaii as well. For those who were interested in how bad the traffic was, here is a video from this past weekend.
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