Gay weddings bring in visitors

Live and let … love. That might be the takeaway message from our community’s apparent calm in the aftermath of the contentious same-sex marriage debate.

If there have been clashes here between gays and churches refusing to marry them, such incidents haven’t escalated to public skirmishes. Instead, some 1,417 same-sex marriages have been celebrated here since Dec. 2, when Hawaii passed its landmark law.

As expected, such aloha is also bringing in tourists. Nearly half of those newly married same-sex couples involved at least one person from out of state. So this looks to have potential for Hawaii as a wedding destination as well as a honeymoon site.

Check the laws before renting out

Companies in what’s called the short-term rental market (aka vacation rentals) are trawling for business across the country, regardless of local laws that might prohibit these kinds of accommodations.

For example, some Hawaii folks this week found in their mailboxes a pitch from FlipKey, the rent-your-home database that’s a subsidiary of the travel site TripAdvisor.

"Owners renting their homes on FlipKey are earning an average of $26,000 per year," the advertisement states.

What it doesn’t include is any information about county regulations governing such things.

A coalition including FlipKey/TripAdvisor, Air-bnb and HomeAway have formed the Short Term Rental Advocacy Center, pushing back about vacation-rental bans. There’s money in this business for them, too.