Christine Hitt
Arrivals to Hawaii keep on climbing. There was a year-over-year increase in visitors in May, according to a recently released report by the Hawaii State Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism (DBEDT). May saw 801,569 visitor arrivals to Hawaii, up 3.2 percent from May 2022.
Looking at the statistics for U.S. arrivals, it's also a positive outlook ahead. "Though visitor arrivals from the U.S. mainland have shown signs of slowing down in the last two months, the May 2023 U.S. visitor arrivals were still 10.7 percent higher than the same month in 2019," said DBEDT director James Tokioka in a statement. "May 2023 marked the 25th consecutive month where visitor arrivals from the U.S. mainland exceeded 2019 monthly levels for those respective months."
In total, 4,075,437 visitors arrived in Hawaii in the first five months of this year, compared with 3,588,405 visitors arriving in the first five months of 2022. That's still lower than the pre-Covid benchmark of 4,224,071 arrivals in the first five months of 2019. This is somewhat expected since DBEDT chief economist Eugene Tian said Hawaii's visitor numbers won't be fully recovered until 2025.