April arrivals off from '01
By Bruce Dunford
Associated Press
HONOLULU — The number of visitors to Hawai'i in April was nearly 15 percent below the same month last year, but state officials said part of the decline was due to an early Easter holiday this year.
The key "visitor days" figure, computed by multiplying the number of visitors by their average length of stay, was down 14.5 percent in April, according to figures released by the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism yesterday.
Domestic visitor days declined 8.2 percent, while international visitor days dropped 30.3 percent from near-record levels of April 2001.
Seiji Naya, the department's director, said the visitor figures thus far this year are about 10 percent below last year, which is consistent with travel trends nationally.
"Considering the March Easter and measured against the high base of the second-strongest April on record in 2001, these results are not unexpected," he said.
The one bright spot was a 6.5 percent increase in the number of visitors coming for meetings, conventions and incentives, the department said.
In the months following the Sept. 11 attacks, the Hawai'i Visitors & Convention Bureau sent a team to the Mainland to solicit more convention business and to encourage those with meetings scheduled not to cancel them, Naya said.
"We are encouraged to see conventioneers returning to the Islands this April," he said.
HVCB expects 28 groups with an estimated 94,300 out-of-state conventioneers will attend events in 2002, a significant improvement over the 52,000 conventioneers who came last year, Naya said.
The 30.3 percent drop in international visitor days resulted from a 24.4 drop in the visitor count and a drop of the average stay from 7.8 days to 6.73 days, the department said.
Through April, the total international visitors days have declined 24 percent.
In the key Japanese market, the visitor days in April were down 29.2 percent from April 2001 because of a 21.3 percent decline in the number of visitors and a shorter length of stay — 5.75 days instead of 6.39 days.
One growth area was in foreign cruise ships which brought 20,076 visitors to the Islands in April on nine vessels, a 49 percent increase over April of last year, the department said.
