Business visitors rising
| • | Chart: Business tourist numbers |
By John Duchemin
Advertiser Staff Writer
Hawai'i tourism has been at or near its all-time peak for 18 months, conjuring visions of hordes of vacationers running around Waikiki and Lahaina in newly acquired aloha wear, orchid leis and sunburns.
Advertiser library photo
That image doesn't provide the whole picture, however. While pleasure seekers do indeed line the beaches, most of the growth in Hawai'i's visitor base lately has come from a more-serious crowd.
Business travelers like these at Newark International Airport in New Jersey have become increasingly important to Hawai'i's visitor industry.
Business travelers have driven the growth in visitors to Hawai'i in the past three years, and were largely responsible for the record level of arrivals in 2000 and early 2001, according to an Advertiser analysis of state travel statistics. Vacation travelers actually fell over that three-year period.
To tourism observers, this represents a clear victory in a decade-long campaign to increase business travel to the state. Although the number of business travelers to the state has fallen as this year has progressed — as corporate travel nationwide stalls with the slowing economy — the long-term trend is still one of healthy growth.
Between June 1998 and January 2001, when business travel reached a peak, there was a 20-percent jump in monthly travelers to Hawai'i for meetings, conventions, other business purposes, and corporate incentive trips. As of June, despite a recent decline, the 12-month average for business travelers was 61,600 per month — compared with 55,200 in June 1998, according to The Advertiser's analysis, which looked at data culled from a monthly tally of airline passenger surveys.
That's an increase of about 80,000 business travelers per year — enough people to fill up several hundred Boeing 747s.
Meanwhile, the number of leisure visitors has actually declined over the past several years, falling from 471,900 per month in June 1998 to 467,400 per month in June 2001. That drop has largely been due to economic troubles in Japan and the subsequent fall-off in Japanese visitors, most of whom come to Hawai'i for vacations, tourism officials said.
Experts say several factors are driving the increase, including Hawai'i's efforts to create a "dual brand" for itself, not only appealing to vacationers but to businesses; and the opening of the Hawai'i Convention Center in 1998.
The trend in business travel to the state is a strong sign, as it means a more consistent, higher-spending base of travelers, said Sandra Moreno, vice president of the corporate meetings department at the Hawai'i Visitors & Conventions Bureau.
People here for business meetings tend to spend more in stores and restaurants, because their hotels and plane tickets are often paid by their employers, said Karen Hughes, director of marketing for Starwood Hotels & Resorts in Hawai'i and French Polynesia.
And business travelers are often first-time visitors, who later make repeat vacation trips with their families, Hughes said.
Also, this type of travel is less seasonal, said Barbara Okamoto, vice president of consumer trends at the visitors bureau. That means a larger business travel base can be expected to help ease the boom-bust travel cycles associated with the holidays, the school year, spring break and summer vacation.
"Clearly, Hawai'i wants to continue to be a leisure destination, but it's good to diversify, to help even out those peaks and valleys," said Stan Brown, vice president for the Pacific islands for Marriott International.
Business travelers also fit the profile of "high-end" visitors, the wealthy, sophisticated crowd that Hawai'i tourism has attempted to attract. As the market shifts to these travelers — as already indicated by increasing revenues per hotel room and a surge in big-spending East Coast visitors — more corporate travelers, particularly groups coming on "incentive" vacation trips, could be attracted by upscale marketing pitches, said travel industry consultant Joseph Toy.
Hotels have also increased their marketing to business travelers, and many have upgraded their infrastructure to meet the demands of corporate visitors. The latest such move came last week when the new owners of the Turtle Bay Resort on Oahu's North Shore announced they will target Hawai'i's lucrative business travel market with a $35 million renovation of the property expected to be complete in September 2002..
And while leisure travelers continue to easily make up the vast majority of visitors to Hawai'i, the share of business travelers has gained, creeping up from about 11 percent of the market in the mid-1990s to more than 12 percent now, according to Hawai'i Visitors and Convention Bureau data.
"That's a hard-fought, well-earned percentage point," said Okamoto of the visitors bureau.
