The 2026 Hawaiʻi Tourism Conference has kicked off at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort.
The event runs for two days from Sept. 24 to 25 and features panels on a variety of tourism topics, including a session on airfares and how global current events could affect consumer confidence in travel.
Economists are also set to meet at the end of the week to discuss AI and its impact on industries that generate money for the state.
Economist Paul Brewbaker is a principal of TZ Economics, a Hawaiʻi economics consulting group, and will be participating in the conference as a panelist.
HPR spoke with Brewbaker to hear his thoughts as interest rates, tariffs and the cost of living all creep up.
“Everything's up 50% or more. Looking into the winter, I'm seeing airfares, the lowest airfares from the East Coast to Hawaiʻi, up around $1,400,” he told HPR.
“And so yeah, that's making people rethink their travel decisions because their incomes haven't gone up 50%.”
As concerns over airfare and cost-of-living continue to be warranted by the ongoing Iran war, concerns over artificial intelligence cause similar anxieties in the economic landscape, Brewbaker said.
“I do think it's important to recognize that the brouhaha about artificial intelligence is not actually new. So this has been going on for a long time, and it's a slow-moving train wreck,” he said.
The unbridled and accelerated development of AI is a “huge, fundamental, structural error that's created real problems for society and a generation of younger people who don't seem to be acquiring the skills that are needed to sustain themselves in the modern economy,” Brewbaker argued.
“I just don't understand why it's being allowed to happen without regard to the potential adverse consequences to society. That's a decision. That's a choice of our leadership in America. That's not an accident.”
Brewbaker is scheduled to close out a panel on Friday, Sept. 25 at the 2026 Hawaii Economic Association Conference about AI's impact on Hawaiʻi’s economy.
This story aired on The Conversation on Sept. 24, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
