A Hawaii Business team of four reporters, four photographers and four interpreters (two Chinese, one Japanese and one Korean) invaded Waikiki. We asked tourists, workers and business owners what they liked and didn’t like about the tourist mecca, and here are the…
Waikiki is the Honolulu Police Department’ssmallest district, but, at three square miles it is also the most densely populated, says Officer John DeMello, who has been patrolling these streets for the past 10 years. I accompanied DeMello one Friday evening and…
Panelists: W. David P. Carey III: President and CEO, Outrigger Enterprises Group Rick Egged: President, Waikiki Improvement Association Eric Gill: Financial Secretary-Treasurer, Unite Here Local 5 Hawaii Ernest “Ernie” K. Nishizaki: Executive VP, Kyo-Ya Co. LLC George D. Szigeti: President…
The Hawaii Tourism Authority understands how hard it will be, but it is trying to rewrite the old saying that insists, What goes up, must come down. There are already strong signs that the tourism boom of the past few years has…
Many of Waikiki’s Homeless Are Mainland Snowbirds Just as tourists trade the cold winters of Minneapolis, Seattle and other cities for the warmth of Waikiki, so do another group of visitors. “There are homeless people who come here in the…
The old International Market Place is dead. For more than 50 years, tourists flocked there, drawn to the warren of cheap jewelry stores, kiosks selling kitschy bric-a-brac and the romance of the original Don the Beachcomber restaurant, which opened there…
When people tell me they never go to Waikiki, I wonder why they would want to miss so many wonderful things. Sure I love to play in the ocean and climb our green mountains far from the madding crowds, but,…
A lot of changes are happening at the Chamber of Commerce of Hawaii, but the most important is probably the chamber’s proactive approach to its legislative agenda. This year, for the first time, the Chamber is drafting its own package of…
Imagine a retail business in which one key measure of sales growth was up 42.2 percent last year, with similar growth this year. You’d be on Easy Street, right? Except this same business is plagued by a perennial problem: Customers…
