Hawaii's Fourth was shared with 200,000 visitors

Hawaii's Fourth was shared with 200,000 visitors
- 2004-07-07 - Pacific Business News (Honolulu)

Howard Dicus
More than 200,000 visitors were in Hawaii over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, based on airport arrival counts posted by the state Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism.

That's based on daily arrival figures over the past week, some of them tallied below. Not shown are arrivals for the last several days of June, which ran to about 24,000 arrivals per day. A typical Japanese visitor stays one week, but a typical visitor from the U.S. East stays more than two weeks, so the true tally may have been much higher than 200,000.

For the first five days of July, running from Thursday through Monday, arrivals were up on all islands. Both the Big Island and Kauai are getting roughly 100 more visitors per day than they did last summer. Maui is getting about 300 more visitors per day. Honolulu is getting about 1,500 more visitors a day when one counts rebounding Japanese arrivals.

Domestic arrivals by air for the first five days of July (year-before comparisons in parenthesis):

Honolulu: 62,688 (58,068).
Maui: 23,312 (21,519).
Big Island: 6,615 (5,811).
Kauai: 5,674 (4,793).
Total statewide: 101,279 (92,190).
International arrivals for the first five days of July (year-before comparisons in parenthesis):

From Japan: 25,137 (19,211).
From other countries: 3,339 (2,048).
Total international, excluding Canada: 28,476 (20,959).
A separate calculation of arrivals by air over the seven days ending July 5 showed traffic was 9 percent greater than in the same period last year. Japanese arrivals were up 35 percent. Mainland arrivals were up 3 percent.

The Fourth of July is actually a slow day for visitor arrivals by Hawaii standards. Domestic arrivals, for example, fell to 16,686 that day while running around 20,000 or greater most other days lately.

But going forward the tallies are likely to be affected by the new Pride of Aloha interisland cruises launched this week by Norwegian Cruise Line. The ship carries roughly 2,000 passengers per weekly trip and most of them will be from out of state.