Fellows mentioned in this story: Meli James

From Hawai‘i Business Magazine:

Although Annie Tan has long wanted to experience Hawai’i’s natural beauty and multicultural communities, she has recently decided to vacation elsewhere for the foreseeable future.

“After the fires in 2023, I remember seeing in the media that a lot of aid efforts were going to tourists and not necessarily to local people. When I started to understand how dependent Hawai‘i is on tourism, that got me thinking that visiting is not a good thing. Maybe it’s not what the people want, especially when I hear of people saying you’re not helping us, and you shouldn’t come and use our land and take away resources from people who are here. But at the same time, I know that people are dependent on tourism there,” says Tan, who lives in the Queens borough of New York and works for a nonprofit.

“It’s confusing as a person who tries to do the right thing. So I straight up have decided that it’s better if I just don’t go.”

Her mixed feelings are echoed among other potential visitors who aren’t sure how to be respectful tourists while so many are still mourning after the Maui wildfires and at a time when anti-tourism sentiment is rising not only in Hawai‘i but around the world. This summer, for example, demonstrators in Barcelona marched through areas popular with tourists, chanting “tourists go home” and squirting them with water pistols.

Continue reading at HawaiiBusiness.com.