Hawaii losing appeal for repeat visitors
While overall satisfaction among Hawaii visitors is high, fewer visitors from North America say they’re “very likely” to return in the next five years, according to the results of a state-commissioned survey.
The latest Visitor Satisfaction and Activity Survey ranks the cost of a trip to Hawaii as the top reason cited among visitors from the U.S. West, U.S. East and Canada who say they are not very likely to return in the next five years.
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The desire to go someplace new as well as the perception that Hawaii was too expensive and a poor value were among the top factors not to return to Hawaii in all North American source markets that were part of the 2023 first-quarter survey. Some visitors also mentioned a perception that Hawaii was overcrowded or too commercialized.
The state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism hired Anthology Research to conduct the survey, using data from Jan. 12 to April 11. The firm surveyed 4,742 visitors from the U.S., Canada, Oceania, South Korea, China and Japan.
More than 60% of visitors surveyed from all markets indicated they were very likely to return to Hawaii in the next five years. However, the percentage who are very likely to return is still falling in some key Hawaii markets.
The percentage of visitors from the U.S. West — Hawaii’s top source of visitors — who said that they would be very likely to return in the next five years fell to 81.2%, a 1 percentage-point drop from the survey’s results in the first quarter of 2022. It marked the lowest score of U.S. visitors who were very likely to return since at least 2016.
Among U.S. East visitors, 65.2% of survey respondents said they would be very likely to return to Hawaii in the next five years. The percentage was down 1.4 percentage points from 66.6% in the first quarter of 2022, and was the lowest percentage of those very likely to return since the first quarter of 2020, which included the start of the pandemic.
Visitors from Canada, which has been Hawaii’s top international market since the pandemic, saw a greater drop than domestic visitors. The percentage of visitors from Canada who said they would be likely to return in the next five years fell to 66.4%, an 8.3 percentage- point drop from the first quarter of 2022.
