Hawaii’s economic growth is slowing even as the tourism industry keeps cranking out record numbers.

One of the state’s leading economists said Thursday that visitor arrivals could decline this year as the number of airline seats bound for Hawaii is poised to decrease 0.5 percent in 2017.

“If we correlate air seats with the supply side of tourism, visitor arrivals will decrease by as low as 1.3 percent,” Eugene Tian said at the annual Pacific Asia Travel Association-Travel and Tourism Research Association 2017 forum at the Ala Moana Hotel.

Fewer seats coming into the state could be offset by more packed planes, Tian said. If the “load factor,” or percentage of airline seats filled, increases to 90 percent from about 85 percent last year, the tourist arrival number still could climb as much as 1.8 percent.

Tian’s projection came just three days after the Hawaii Tourism Authority announced that both visitor arrivals and spending hit all-time highs for the fifth year in a row.

Arrivals rose 3 percent to 8.94 million in 2016 while spending increased 4.2 percent to $15.61 billion, according to preliminary data released Monday by HTA. Airlines also transported a record 12 million air seats from mainland and international destinations to Hawaii last year, HTA said.

Tian, chief economist for the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, said the decline in air seats; rising initial unemployment claims; and slower construction activity, based on the value of building permits declining in 2016, will pressure the economy this year.

Still, he said Hawaii continues to follow a normal growth path and last year measured up favorably with the rest of the nation. In 2016, he said, Hawaii had the fourth-lowest not-seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in the nation, the ninth-highest income growth and the 14th-highest employment growth. Tian said those rankings might decline a little this year.

Panelist Paul Brewbaker, principal of TZ Economics, said visitor spending when adjusted for inflation actually has been flat since 2012.

“A strong dollar and rising room rates on Oahu have eroded the purchasing power of many of the foreign visitor groups — Japan, Canada and so on — and shortened average stay length,” Brewbaker said. “Adjusted for inflation, Oahu visitor expenditure has been declining for several years even while neighbor island visitor spending has been rising because there’s more excess (hotel) capacity. There’s a lower occupancy rate, so they can grow into that capacity. The two have offset each other. So for four years or so, total visitor expenditure adjusted for inflation has been constant.”

Brewbaker said that is the reason revenue in the state’s general fund was up only 0.6 percent during the first half of the current fiscal year despite the expectation that revenue would climb 5.5 percent this fiscal year.

“If you’re trying to understand, like the governor and the Legislature, why state revenues don’t seem to be growing like one would expect because we had a record year, it’s because after you make the adjustment for inflation, tourism has been kind of flat, the spending part, which is where the tax revenue comes from,” he said.

Despite a possible tourism slowdown, hotels statewide are projected to improve their performances this year, according to panelist Joe Toy, president and CEO of local hotel industry consulting firm Hospitality Advisors LLC.

Toy is forecasting that statewide hotel occupancy will expand to 81 percent in 2017 from 79.2 percent in 2016, the average daily rate for rooms will rise to $265 from a record $255 last year, and revenue per available room, or RevPAR — one of the best measures of industry performance — will increase to $215 from a record $202. RevPAR reflects the price attained by each hotel room regardless of whether it’s occupied.

Toy said hotels will feel more pricing pressure when more properties come online.

“A lot of the strength in the hotel business was because we had a lot of hotels that were out of service,” Toy said. “We lost about 5,000 hotel rooms in Waikiki and 8,000 statewide to conversions over the last 10 years. That’s helped boost the numbers up. But we’re going to be seeing a lot of supply coming in over the next five years, and that’s going to start putting a bit more pressure on the rates, primarily for Oahu.”

Toy said the “game changer” for the next five years will be Ko Olina, particularly because of investor China Oceanwide Holdings Ltd.

“They’re putting in $1.5 billion to $2 billion of new product out there,” he said. “They’re putting in a lot of investment, and that’s the real linchpin to making Ko Olina complete.”

Toy said there’s been a shift by visitors not only in Hawaii, but also globally as they look for other types of accommodations, such as timeshares, Airbnb, VRBO (vacation rentals by owner) and condo rentals. He also said visitors are looking to have a different kind of experience than traditionally staying in a hotel and going to an attraction.

“Now they want to become embedded,” he said. “They want to become part of the community and live there as part of the community, as opposed to staying in Waikiki in a hotel where you have this controlled environment. That’s a completely different mindset in travel. If you look at the travel industry 10, 20 years ago it was quite different than it is now. People have become extremely experienced travelers, and they’re willing to take chances. They know much more what they’re doing.”