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Can Hawai'i have tourism without Hawaiians?

This article is based on a presentation Peter Apo made to the Hawai'i Tourism Authority on behalf of the Native Hawaiian Hospitality Association.

By Peter Apo

Aloha is a simple and standard Hawaiian greeting, a greeting that expresses not just a welcome but a greeting that embodies a hospitality value of the Hawaiian culture that is intrinsic to our demeanor as a people. While there are many definitions of the word aloha — when used in the context of welcoming a stranger, it means "let there be friendship and love between us."

Waikiki has been described by its critics as Anywhere, U.S.A. — with coconut trees — prompting periodic "revitalization" initiatives. Advertiser library photo

But aloha is still a vital part of the Hawaiian vocabulary, given this deeper spiritual meaning in the

15th century when the great chief Ma'ili'kukahi was chosen to be king of O'ahu and he moved the seat of government from Wailua to Waikiki, where he began a long reign of benevolence and prosperity.

A hallmark legacy of his rule was the degree to which he saw to the comfort of his people and the extension of these comforts to all strangers.

So it followed that Waikiki became a place of healing, respite and entertainment. Hawaiians have been in the hospitality mode since the 15th century — and the concept of ho'okipa, or Hawaiian hospitality, is still an intrinsic cultural value of the Hawaiian people. However — and this is the operative phrase — the opportunities for Hawaiians to access the visitor industry to express that ho'okipa have greatly diminished in the last 35 years of industry growth.

Hawaiians disenfranchised

The prevailing paradigm of a market-driven model of Hawai'i's visitor industry that is completely driven by paid advertising puts it beyond the ability of the host culture to even begin to become a player. The result is that one of the world's greatest societies of natural hosts has been — however inadvertently — essentially disenfranchised from the very industry it created in its own land.

And so if it were up to us to write the top-10 list of "best practices in sustainable travel and tourism for Hawai'i," No. 1 would be: Sustain the presence of the host culture.

First, let's establish the fact that mass travel — of which 80 percent is tourism travel — is about a $3.5 trillion industry. Within the first quarter-century of this millennium, economists predict it will soar to between $10 trillion and $15 trillion to make it one of the world's largest growth industries.

Why are we so sure that the growth curve will maintain itself? Because the urge to travel is one of the purest of human urges. Traveling for pleasure not only informs and titillates us, it in fact possesses us. In addition to the stratospheric numbers — more than any other phenomena of the last hundred years such as nuclear power, television, computers and so forth — mass travel will be the one that will most change the world.

Whether these changes present opportunities or controversy for existing and emerging destinations will depend on the quality of the corporate and government leadership in whose hands lies the destiny of each place.

Growth of mass travel

It's only in the last 60 years that mass travel has been affordable for large numbers of people, and that technologies and travel systems have made it possible to move millions of people around the world swiftly and safely.

In my own lifetime in Hawai'i, we've gone from a couple of Matson liners a week to thousands of visitors carried by fleets of jetliners. And so to my point that the industry is so young that only in recent years have we been able to measure the impact of tourism on destinations around the globe.

To examine the question of preservation and sustainability, make four assumptions.

The first assumption is that we're concerned about sustainable strategies as they might affect or relate to sustaining market share and accommodating growth.

The second assumption is that what we want to sustain are those things that attracted the early visitor to the developing destination in the first place and gave the destination its "market value." It's ironic that in most destinations, it's the same things that are loved and cherished by the host population that lives there — those things that define them as a people and the place as theirs.

George Kanahele, the founder of the organization I represent, the Native Hawaiian Hospitality Association, came up with the world "topistics." And he defines topistics as the study of intangible aspects of a place such as its anthropological history, its cultural experiences and expressions, community memory, societal behaviors, the collective emotional output of the host population, smells, sounds, colors, all of which amalgamate into an energy field that radiates from a place.

He postulates that visitors travel in search of a topistical feeling, that while they may not be able to describe it when they find it, it is a very important value discovery. Hawai'i's challenge is to preserve our topistical Hawaiian sense of place.

The third assumption is that most people who come to Hawai'i have the expectation they will encounter a Hawaiian experience. It's probably fair to say that the Hawaiian culture has thrived in spite of tourism. So the culture is not only being sustained, it's experiencing exponential growth.

The tragedy is that genuine Hawaiian cultural experiences only infrequently get connected to the visitor market.

The fourth assumption is defining what constitutes a "tourism experience." The Hawaiian ho'okipa model assumes the "tourism" experience as a triangular relationship between the visitor, the host and the destination. Whenever these three elements converge, they result in a tourism experience — good or bad. The quality of the experience is determined by how well each of the elements is managed and the conditions that prevail at the time of convergence.

Business model of tourism

When we contrast what occurs in the prevailing tourism model, we find there is a profound difference between the Hawaiian ho'okipa model and the model which has served as the bible for the global growth of tourism — the business model.

In the business model, of the three elements — visitor, host and place — the visitor looms as the most important. "The customer is always right" is a tried and true service industry principle in every other business. But as the industry has evolved over the past 60 years, we are discovering that the "visitors first" model has a profoundly negative effect on our destination.

Visitors change a place first by their presence — and then by their expectations of comforts and amenities, such as standards of transportation, restaurants, hotels — all of which must be created specifically for them.

In our rush to make the visitor comfortable, we begin to change the place until finally one day we look around and find that we've created the place from which the visitor was trying to escape, completely altering the landscape as well as the environmental and regional culture, which took many generations to evolve. Waikiki is our case study.

Waikiki has been described by some as Anywhere, U.S.A. — with coconut trees. And so we've launched the "Revitalization of Waikiki" initiative and the "Restoring Hawaiianess to Waikiki" initiative. And yet, as we speak, destinations all over the world are suffering from the same bad judgments and will no doubt, in time, come to the same finding and launch their own revitalization initiatives.

For all the marketing of O'ahu, because of our Waikiki mistakes, O'ahu is the place you fly over on your way to Maui. And if Maui is not careful, indications are that it can easily go the way of Waikiki.

Acknowledging mistakes

The good news, at least for Waikiki, is that we've moved out of our denial, acknowledged our mistakes and are moving to significantly change that landscape.

In the ho'okipa model, if not the visitor first then you would think perhaps the host is first. Wrong. The ho'okipa model reveres the condition of the place as the key to defining the quality of the experience, first for the people who live there and second for the visitor.

The ho'okipa model, which attempts to protect the place — not for the visitor's comfort but for the comfort of the host population — is how you sustain the welcome of the host population.

And to be clear, the ho'okipa model does not preclude destination development. But it begs sensitivity to the cultural landscape and assigning value to view planes, seascapes, historic buildings, historic sites and all those things that culturally define the community and gives it a sense of place.

This calls for development planning that guards against obnoxious intrusions on culturally sensitive areas. Planning that also guards against the removal or altering of historic buildings and cultural landscapes that feed the human spirit of the host population. We are back to topistics — that feeling that we all seek when we travel.

Now to the host. If the ho'okipa model puts the place before the host, it's because for native populations, the model recognizes that the place is the very embodiment of the host culture. As the place goes, so goes the host.

I cite Waikiki again as the example of a destination that alienated its host. The tough sell on revitalizing Waikiki is to the general local population. Locals have to be convinced that Waikiki is not beyond redemption, and more important, that they are welcomed back to make it their own. Native Hawaiians are an even tougher sell on Waikiki.

In some Hawaiian communities, there are very hostile reactions whenever Waikiki is mentioned. I used to be one of those people who thought the place beyond redemption. But our founder, George Kanahele, gave me a wake-up call in arguing that Waikiki has never stopped being a Hawaiian place.

The iwi kupuna, the bones of our ancestors, lie beneath its streets and under its buildings, its parks and its beaches. But I was a tough sell for George until the day I stood at the corner of Kalakaua Avenue and Alohilani Street to witness a burial excavation. As I stood there staring down into the sand pit, watching a burial specialist reach down and gently brush away some sand, there appeared a baby's skull, and next to it a larger skull, probably its mother or father.

The experience brought me to tears and I began to understand what George was trying to tell me about this place and my responsibility as a Native Hawaiian. Not only is Waikiki not beyond redemption, but it is our kuleana as the host culture to recapture it, to take care of it, to nurture it, to be part of the solution and to respect our ancestors by not abandoning them.

Beneficiaries of tourism

It's unfortunate that of all the players, the host communities have the smallest voice and are not necessarily the direct beneficiaries of tourism. Yet they are the ones being asked to share themselves, their families and their lives with unrelenting waves of strangers. For the most part, they have no choice but to live in tourism's onslaught and in its wake.

The ho'okipa model ensures that the host culture is provided a seat at the table. It advocates inclusiveness in planning the destination, and it recognizes that the host has something important to contribute.

I would be stunned should there ever be created a Hawaiian seat on the Hawai'i Tourism Authority. I was not surprised that the one seat allocated to a "community" representative was nonvoting. This is the arrogance that makes it hard to sustain good will.

Another finding we make about the business model as it relates to the relationship between the destination, the visitor and the host population is that the more mature a destination becomes, the more the hosts are displaced. The resulting phenomena are that the destination centers eventually become places where no one who works in the destination lives there. This is what constitutes a theme park.

There was a time in the early evolution of tourism in Hawai'i when the community was directly connected to the visitor population. There was an absence of the sophisticated layers of marketing ploys, travel desks, destination management companies and so forth to control a visitor's time and money. Visitors would leave their hotel room and set out on self-discovery journeys, relying on local people for their information. It followed that they would end up where local people go.

This process afforded them access to high-quality experiences because — and this is very important — it afforded local people the opportunity to engage and do what comes so natural to us: to be gracious and to exercise our considerable hosting skills.

The hosts were able to greet the visitors with dignity and on their own terms. The exchanges were magic. This was definitely a best-practice model of convergence of guest, host and place, multiplied by hundreds of experiences. It gave the destination tremendous market value. It also made the host feel franchised and included in an important way in the operating paradigm.

But then, as we tinkered further with this business of tourism, there began to rise a corporate interface that had the effect of shielding the visitor from the host. The intervention of the institutions of corporate tourism yielded a surrogate host.

Paid corporate advertising dominates visitor choices by dominating the information management system that excludes the once-gracious host community from engaging the visitor directly.

A granite wall of commerce now stands between the host and the hosted. The host culture is abruptly disconnected from the visitor market.