Visitor arrivals in Septem­- ber recovered to 96% of Sept­ember 2019’s pre-­pandemic level — the best recovery rate since the devastating Maui wildfires in August 2023 interrupted tourism’s recovery.

Visitor expenditures and arrivals in September outpaced the previous September; however, the year-over-year gains were largely due to comparison with September 2023, when tourism was still reeling from the Maui wildfires.

Arrivals to Hawaii rose 7.8% year over year to 707,486 visitors, according to preliminary statistics released Thursday by the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. The gain was mostly due to Maui arrivals rebounding 77.3% to 164,932 visitors compared with September 2023, when there were only 93,027 visitors since West Maui was still closed to tourism following the deadly fires.

Cruise ships travelers rose 129.1% from September 2023; however, that segment has a relatively small footprint at 18,665 visitors.

More than a year after the wildfires, which leveled Lahaina and killed 102 people, the dampening continues to affect tourism performance statewide. September arrivals to Oahu fell 1.3% from September 2023 and 12.5% on Molokai. They were also down 5.1% on Lanai, 14.1% on Kauai and 11.5% on Hawaii island.

Total visitor spending measured in nominal dollars in September was nearly $1.45 billion, a gain of 4.6% from September 2023. However, results varied. Year-over-year visitor spending fell on Oahu, Molokai, Kauai and Hawaii island, but visitors who came on cruise ships spent more, as did visitors to Maui and Lanai.

“The increases aren’t a big amount, in my opinion, given that you had the Maui wildfires,” said Jack Richards, CEO and president of Pleasant Holidays. “When you are comparing to the period 30, 60, 90 days after the wildfires, you would expect everything to be up.”

Richards said the protracted strike of 1,800 UNITE HERE Local 5 workers at Oahu’s largest resort, the Hilton Hawaiian Village, hasn’t been great for business, and he hopes resolution comes soon.

“A few of our visitors have canceled their trips, some are moving hotels. Luckily, it’s fall and business is soft, so we’ve been able to accommodate them,” he said. “The strike needs to end. It’s gone on too long.”

Richards said overall numbers across Hawaii are showing some improvement, which is good, but the recovery is slower than anticipated, especially into the first quarter of 2025.

“Last week we were showing that actual bookings to Hawaii were up 30% year-over-year for travel to Hawaii in 2025 compared to the same time last year,” he said. “That’s the good news, but the bad news is that we were still down double digits compared to last year in January, February and March. The visitors are definitely going somewhere else during the first quarter; it’s not that they aren’t traveling, because we are up double digits in Mexico and the Caribbean.”

Keith Vieira, principal of KV &Associates, Hospitality Consulting, said the first-quarter downturn is concerning.

“History has shown us when we miss the first quarter, we miss the whole year,” he said.

An issue is that while international markets showed September gains, they were relatively low given that most international markets have still been recovering from pandemic lulls. Some 64,940 visitors came from Japan, Hawaii’s top international market, which was only 0.6% higher than in September 2023.

However, the overall results were helped by September arrivals to Hawaii from the mainland, the state’s top market, which rose 7.6% year-over-year to 519,987 visitors. The September U.S. visitor count was 18.4% higher than the same month in 2019, and for the first nine months of 2024, the U.S. visitor count was 6% higher than the same period in 2019.

“Current airlift and travel agency bookings data indicate that the U.S. market will still be leading Hawaii’s tourism recovery in the future months,” DBEDT Director James Kunane Tokioka said in a news release. “We expect that the foreign exchange rate will be more favorable to foreign visitors and the international market will improve in the near future.”

Tokioka said that during the first nine months of 2024, the recovery of foreign visitors was at 63.6%, while Japanese visitor recovery was at 44.5%.

He added that the count of U.S. visitors in September was the second-highest count of U.S. visitors of any September on record. The highest count of U.S. visitors of any September was in 2022, when 566,189 came to Hawaii.

Tokioka also cited the rebound of Hawaii’s cruise industry, which has surpassed pre-pandemic 2019 levels, as another contributing factor in September’s performance.

“Nine out-of-state cruise ships brought 18,655 visitors to the islands in September 2024, more than double the number of visitors who came by cruise ships in September 2023 and 3% higher than September 2019,” he said. “For the first nine months of 2024, there were 58 arrivals from out-of-state cruise ships that carried more than 106,000 visitors, a growth of 11.5% compared to year-to-date 2019.”

Overall, the year-to-date trend is still soft. More than 7.2 million visitors arrived in the first nine months of 2024, which was a decrease of 1.3% from the first nine months of 2023 and a decline of 7.6% from the first nine months of 2019.

In the first nine months of 2024, total visitor spending measured in nominal dollars was $15.5 billion, down 1.7% from $15.7 billion in the first nine months of 2023 but up 16.6% from the $13.3 billion in nominal spending during the first nine months of 2019.

Richards said a recent Hawai‘i Convention and Visitors Bureau marketing saturation effort, which was supported by the Hawai‘i Tourism Authority and industry partners, helped some but that more marketing efforts are needed in top markets like Los Angeles and California’s Bay Area.

Vieira said HTA provided $1.5 million for the HVCB’s Aloha Market Los Angeles Activation, and the industry matched it 3-to-1 and is looking for more opportunities to partner on marketing with greater lead time.

“We usually outspend by six to nine times, but we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare,” he said. “We have to do more. We have to get more money into the market to drive demand.”

Vieira said Hawaii lawmakers should consider funding HTA’s increased budget request of $80 million, which is still much lower than past budgets, which approached $100 million at a time when everything, including marketing, cost less.

“Marketing fell behind when HTA went from two years of being defunded to $63 million, and roughly half of that is going to destination marketing,” he said. “Really, HTA’s budget needs to be $100 million or even $120 million.”