Posted on: Saturday, September 18, 2004

Hawaiian Airlines will ask for China flights

By Dan Nakaso
Advertiser Staff Writer

Hawaiian Airlines will apply next week to become the first airline to fly directly from Shanghai, China, to Honolulu, widening the door to the potentially lucrative Chinese travel market.

Hawaiian will send its application sometime next week to the U.S. Department of Transportation to make four round-trip flights per week from Shanghai to Honolulu.

"It's the first step in many to try to win these slots," Hawaiian spokesman Keoni Wagner said yesterday. "It could be years before any service starts, if we are in fact successful."

Hawaiian hopes to use its long-range, Boeing 767-300ER jets, which have the capacity to carry 252 passengers.

The idea has Hawai'i tourism officials excited about the possibilities of expanding Chinese travel to the Islands.

"Hawaiian is positioning themselves well, if they're able to receive that route, for what we all anticipate to be huge opportunities," said Marsha Wienert, Gov. Linda Lingle's tourism liaison. "The real thing is the potential. That's going to equate to a lot of people and a lot of money going through our economy."

Restrictive travel visas make it difficult for ordinary Chinese to come to Hawai'i.

Chinese visitors need to wait 30 to 60 days for a visa, pass an interview and pay a fee, Wienert said.

"And that all depends on them correctly filling out the form," she said.

Officials hope that the system can be made easier.

"We all have our fingers crossed," Wienert said. "We all understand the need for tighter security and we agree with it ... But we need to figure out a better system, and there's a lot of people working on it."

Last year, 25,396 Chinese visited the Islands. The overwhelming majority, 17,775 were business people who stopped in Hawai'i on their way back from Mainland business trips.

They stayed an average of 6.64 days and spent an average of $222.39 per day, according to state tourism data.

While the amount of money the Chinese spent wasn't as high as other groups, especially Japanese tourists, the potential lies in the sheer volume of Chinese visitors in the future.

Tourism forecasts project that China will produce the world's largest generation of outbound tourists — 100 million by 2020.

"Hawaiian's been looking for new long-range markets for the last couple of years, new routes to open and routes that would better utilize our long-range aircraft," Wagner said. "Obviously China is a huge market and Shanghai is a bustling, commercial center with a large, middle-class population that has the desire to travel and the means to do so."

Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com or at 525-8085.