Maui's recovery includes building back its economy. One way to do that is a plan marketing Maui to boost the visitor industry, hard hit in the months following the wildfires.
Empty hotel rooms were used to house the thousands of people whose homes were destroyed. Industry leaders grappled with how to provide information to tourists about what was open and what was closed.
This past legislative session lawmakers set aside $6 million to market Maui as a tourism destination. Their hope is to bring back jobs for locals and to help the many small businesses that are still struggling to survive.
The Conversation talked to the representatives from the Hawaiʻi Visitors and Convention Bureau about its marketing plan: Aaron Salā, president and CEO; Tom Mullen, senior vice president and chief operating officer; and Jeffrey Eslinger, senior director, market insights and customer relationship management.
Interview highlights
On $6 million tourism recovery plan
MULLEN: The governor approved the $6 million plan, and so we went into action as quickly as we could. Unfortunately, we're a little bit late in the market that we wanted to be, but we have a program that's got wholesalers involved in it. The wholesalers are key, because they bring value to the marketplace, to the consumers. And that's one of the things we heard from consumers is the price of coming to Hawaiʻi. So this is a value-focused effort with the wholesalers. Lots of effort in there. Most of their campaign is going to be hitting in the late part of the summer, August, September, October. So that's when we hope to see the real ramp up at that time of bookings, which should drive things in the fall and into the first quarter of 2026. We also have other things that allow consumers to book directly with properties as well. We're running flights of media that's going to drive that a couple of times this year as well as a social campaign that's going to have some new voices about Maui and talking about Maui and coming back to Maui.
On tracking the success of the marketing campaign
ESLINGER: What we did is we created a baseline to see, before we went into the market, what the West Coast consumer thinks about Maui and Hawaiʻi in particular. Are they motivated to come? Are they intending to come? What are the things that they think when they think about Hawaiʻi? All those, before they saw our messaging. And then what we'll do is what Tom mentioned, we're going to have our heavy up in August through the early fall. We will follow up with that group right after with some of the examples of the creative that they have seen, whether that be with our wholesale partners or the consumer partners or social media, to see if it resonated with them and if they had seen it in the market. Then in the second phase, they'll be saying if they intend to visit Hawaiʻi in the next six to 12 months, and then we're going to go back, and we're going to then research to see if those people actually did come, and if they did, we'll measure their spending and how long they stayed, and their behavior and things like that.
On regenerative tourism
SALĀ: This is one campaign that affords us the opportunity to check ourselves. And as we move forward, we're starting to infuse some of the values that we think drive regenerativity, and not simply thinking that we want a visitor to come and then to leave the destination better than it was when they arrived. Really just, I want to understand the tactics of that. I want to understand how that actually gets done on the ground. We're in a learning phase at the bureau right now, going through a strategic plan, but that strategic plan really is ultimately driven by our ability to do good work in and with community, in and with the market. And so this particular campaign affords us the opportunity to do that good work and then check ourselves as a result of the results of that work. And so we're excited about that. We're excited for Maui. We have high expectations, and hopefully those expectations are met. And as Jeffrey noted, designing the metrics so that we can measure ourselves in the work that we do and measure the market's response to that is really key. A part of that regenerativity is then designing the metrics that include how a community responds, a community's expectations, a community's desires for that visitation, for that the experience, how that experience all mutually supports the entire ecosystem, is key to our success.
This story aired on The Conversation on Aug. 5, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this interview for the web.
