Matson giving away Hawai'i vacations
By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer
Matson Navigation Co. said yesterday it will give away 120 free Hawai'i vacations to Northern and Southern California residents in January to help stimulate the state's tourism business.
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
Aloha Airlines and Starwood Hotels, partners in the promotion, will donate another 44 interisland vacation weekends for Hawai'i residents to win.
Matson president and CEO C. Bradley Mulholland and Gov. Ben Cayetano announce Matson's plan to give away 120 Hawai'i vacation packages to California residents and 44 interisland packages to Hawai'i residents to help the economy.
Matson President C. Bradley Mulholland said the free trips will publicize Hawai'i's beauty and the fact that it is a safe destination.
Mulholland said Hawai'i, reached almost exclusively by air, is "the only place where everybody who arrives goes through a security check when they come and when they leave."
When the public regains its appetite for travel, Mulholland said, "the huge amount of safeguards in Hawai'i will be a very big deal" in influencing travellers to choose Hawai'i.
Gov. Ben Cayetano saluted Matson as the first non-tourism business to recognize restoring visitor activity is the key to all economic activity in the state, and Cayetano said he hopes others will follow suit.
Matson is a cargo operation today, but its roots are deep in Hawai'i tourism. It was the company that brought thousands of early visitors to Hawai'i on its fleet of "white ships" like the Lurline and the Matsonia, and which built the Royal Hawaiian and Moana hotels, now operated by Starwood.
Hawai'i represents up to 70 percent of Matson's business and is home to 90 percent of its assets, from ships to containers to cranes, Mulholland said.
Mulholland said his company will use $120,000 previously budgeted for advertising and promotion to try to stimulate tourism, in the belief that the dollars will go farther in that fashion to help the state and all its residents than either a gift to charity or a $120,000 cut in shipping rates.
The promotion will have an advertising value of about $1.2 million, he said, with at least one San Francisco radio station doing its vacation give-away broadcasts from Hawai'i, and Los Angeles cable television stations reaching 2.4 million households with 18,900 promotional spots during the giveaway month.
Hawai'i charities will get an estimated $30,000 in proceeds from online auctions of another 50 Hawai'i vacations, and 10 more vacations are being provided to AOL Travel for its Rediscover America/Hawai'i Week program reaching 30 million households.
The vacations for California and other Mainland residents are being offered in two-person packages, with three nights and four days in Hawai'i.
Reach Walter Wright at 525-8054 or wwright@honoluluadvertiser.com .
