EDITORIAL
Results of Pro Bowl seem worth the price

As the price of keeping the Pro Bowl in Hawai'i ratchets up to $5.5 million a year, we're still wondering, in objective terms, if we're getting enough bang for our buck.

And finally, the Hawai'i Tourism Authority has some answers. Its recent survey found that the NFL's annual all-star event drew about 18,000 visitors to Hawai'i earlier this month. That's 2,000 more than last year.

However, this year's batch of Pro Bowl visitors didn't stay as long as last year's, and thus brought in $1.6 million less than projected. But what we were left with was a total expenditure of $23.84 million, which boosted state tax revenues by $2.3 million.

Is it a poor bargain if the state spends more than $5 million for an event that returns less than half that amount in tax revenues?

Well, no. There are other, harder-to-quantify, advantages to hosting the Pro Bowl. There's the exposure Hawai'i gets when it is aired on TV, reaching 6.3 million homes. We expect at least some Mainlanders think about vacationing in Hawai'i when they compare their winter weather to ours, and get a load of the scenery.

There's also the fact that many Hawai'i residents are serious football fans, and this is the only exposure to the professional level that comes here. Hawai'i fans eat it up.

But how much is it worth to Hawai'i? On the one hand, Orlando has been pushing hard to win it away from us. On the other, it's clear that NFL players and their families prefer Hawai'i and genuinely consider their trip here to be a reward.

On balance, we think the tourism authority is right to try for a price reduction in the last two years of the contract. But bottom line, let's hang on to the Pro Bowl.