Wall Street corporate hotel owners and managers have cut down on important guest services even as they have imposed huge increases in room rates. This corporate profiteering is disappointing Hawaii’s visitors, tainting our brand as a visitor destination, and endangering Hawaii’s future.

Even before the pandemic, most Hawaii’s hotels increasingly cut back on customary and expected hotel services like daily room cleaning, room service, valet parking, and food and beverage service. Guests are increasingly annoyed by long lines and unavailable service due to staffing cuts. Meanwhile, hotels are imposing sizable room rate increases and additional resort fees despite cuts in guest services.

Hawaii can’t afford these reductions in the value of our product. We are a resort destination. Vacationing families need and expect full services during their stay. Hawaii is an expensive place to visit. Reducing guest services while making prices even higher gets Hawaii a reputation as a high-priced, lousy-service destination. This is not a path to a viable future for Hawaii’s primary industry.

Hawaii is already experiencing reduced numbers of visitors from one of our most important markets: Japan. With all the hand-wringing from industry spokesmen about the current weakness in Japanese visitor arrivals, none have owned up to an obvious cause. Japanese visitors, always service conscious, are going elsewhere where they can get better value for their money.

This is not happening by accident. Hotel owners are bragging to their investors about the huge increases in revenue they are getting from record increases in room rates and reductions in staffing. Reducing hotel staffing and the guest services that depend on it not only provides corporations with short-term profit increases, but also directly increases the purchase price owners get when hotels are sold. The corporate owners of Hawaii’s hotels are making record profits by reducing hotel jobs and the guest services that hotel workers provide.

If we wish to build our economy and provide a future for our generations, Hawaii must defend our most important industry against short-sighted corporate profiteering. We need our guests to feel they got their money’s worth. We need them to want to come back.

It is Hawaii’s hotel workers that are doing something about this. The members of our unions are taking the lead in pushing back against service cuts and defending Hawaii hotel jobs. Thousands of hotel workers have already conducted strikes and work stoppages this year. There is more to come, since hotel owners and managers have failed to address the issue in contract negotiations.

Hotel workers are putting themselves on the line (literally) to defend Hawaii’s future but we must not stand alone in defending Hawaii’s economy from corporate predation. We all have a stake in defending Hawaii’s excellent “aloha spirit” reputation for great guest service. We can’t let the profiteering of global corporations ruin our prospects. We ask Hawaii’s people to support us in our strikes.

But public support for striking hotel workers will not be enough by itself. It’s time for Hawaii political leaders to get serious about defending Hawaii’s brand, before it is irrevocably tainted in the global tourism market.

We cannot depend on the global finance monopolies that own our hotels to solve this. They are the ones that are creating this problem. This won’t be solved through “market forces,” either. It is market forces that are pushing us the wrong direction. We need to take political action.

Our state and local governments need to set and enforce high standards for service in Hawaii hotels.

Cade Watanabe is financial secretary-treasurer of UNITE HERE Local 5; Chris West is president of ILWU Local 142.