More than a month has passed since the devastating Maui wildfires on August 8. Ninety-seven people have died to date, and 2,403 residential housing units were destroyed, not to mention all of the businesses and historical landmarks in Lahaina. And now, on top of this enormous and unimaginable amount of collective grief, the island is facing an additional crisis: an economic crash.
Maui relies on business and tourism, and after the fires, many people stopped coming. According to the Hawai‘i Tourism Authority, 91 flights to Maui have been canceled since the onset of the wildfires, and Maui is losing an estimated $11 million per day as a result. This is partly due to confusion around the initial messaging that came from the island. Immediately after the fires, locals, Hawai‘i Governor Josh Green, the Hawai‘i Tourism Authority, and many Native Hawaiian celebrities sent out a clear message around the world: Please don’t visit Maui. On social media and through traditional media, they asked travelers to postpone their trips or head home if they were already there, so that all of the island’s limited resources could go to those who needed them most.
“For the first two weeks after the fires, all life kind of just stopped, and there was this grace period where the entire island was focused on: How do we take care of our people right now? We were in emergency response mode,” explains Kainoa Horcajo, a Native Hawaiian cultural consultant and volunteer at Maui Rapid Response, a Hawaiian-led disaster response team. “But as that grace period ended, it dawned on a lot of us: This is going to be really dangerous.”
Once locals and government agencies began to realize what was at stake economically, they changed the messaging to: Please come to the rest of Maui, just not West Maui (where the majority of the fires took place). And then on September 8, Governor Josh Green announced that West Maui, with the exception of Lahaina, will fully reopen on October 8—exactly two months after the fire. “This difficult decision is meant to bring hope for recovery to the families and businesses on Maui that have been so deeply affected in every way by the disaster,” he said in a statewide address.
Still, many locals are worried that the messaging has gotten lost in translation, and want to make it very, very clear: Maui, with the exception of Lahaina, is very much open for tourism, despite the initial messaging that said otherwise. “For a while we said don’t come, and now the message is come respectfully, but don’t go to Lahaina. But at the end of the day, people hear that message and still hear, don’t come at all, because it’s hard to convey nuance and complexity in any sort of messaging and media,” explains Horcajo. “So while our county government has recognized and responded to a lot of its deficiencies in communication, it’s still hard to counteract the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of individual posts from people who say otherwise. And that’s the world we’re in right now.”
It’s a world that has left many locals, especially business owners on other parts of the island, struggling to stay afloat. Garrett Marrero, CEO and co-founder of Maui Brewing Company, Hawai‘i’s largest craft brewery, says that his beer business, which had one location in Lahaina and two in other parts of the island, has been severely impacted by the lack of tourists—and he wants to encourage people to come visit to help boost the economy. “There are unaffected areas of Maui where families can come and enjoy themselves, and that’s the single best thing anyone can do for Maui right now: Come visit and support the local small businesses,” he says. “This will allow our economy to begin to heal and provide much-needed jobs to our community.”
Shay Smith, founder and owner of Ocean Organic Farm and Distillery, an 80-acre organic farm and vodka distillery on the slopes of the volcano Haleakalā, echoes that sentiment: “The remainder of the island’s destinations are safe and open, and our community and businesses need your participation,” he says. And it’s not just public-facing businesses that are struggling, either, Horcajo points out. “There’s also a whole other side of the service industry that you don t see: engineers, IT departments, all of the trades including electricians and plumbers. Everyone is taking a hit some way and somehow.”
But despite the tragedy, locals have not lost all hope. In fact, though they are very much still in the grieving period, many are also starting to see this time as a pivotal moment to reshape the future of tourism in Maui. “As tragic as this disaster has been, it also presents an opportunity for our community to envision our future,” says Tapani Vuori, general manager of the Maui Ocean Center. “So let’s start by asking anyone coming to Maui to have an open heart and to be respectful, caring, and compassionate when you visit,” he continues.
Horcajo agrees: “This is one of those times that we really begin to see the end goal as a community and envision what we want travel to Hawai‘i to be,” he says. To him, that means continuing to shift the narrative of Hawai‘i away from a place of commercialized paradise toward a regenerative, holistic ecotourism destination where Native Hawaiian culture always leads the way—not least because the fires themselves were a result of cultural exploitation and colonialism. “Our message as a community hasn’t changed since after the fires…we’ve always said that if you’re going to come to Hawai‘i, come knowing that this is Indigenous, native land, that there s a wild and complex history here, and that you need to respect the local people and culture when you’re here,” he explains. “But now everything is exponentialized. We know the effects of overtourism and overexploitation of cultural resources, and we’ve made a conscious decision to shift the pendulum the other way.”
So what does this mean for you as a traveler? Go to Maui, and do what you can to help out in a conscious way in return. Ilihia Gionson, public affairs officer at the Hawai‘i Tourism Authority, suggests buying local, eating local, and/or volunteering your time at one of the many organizations dedicated to the wildfire relief, including Hawai‘i Community Foundation’s Maui Strong Fund, the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement’s Kāko‘o Maui Fund, and the American Red Cross. Another option: Help the island in other ways, like participating in a beach cleanup or volunteering on a local farm. Check out Kanu Hawai‘i, the Hawai‘i Visitors and Convention Bureau and Hawai‘i Tourism Authority’s Mālama Hawai‘i campaign, or their voluntourism page for lots of choices. No matter what you do, be sure to go with patience, compassion, and aloha for the community, advises Gionson: “Responsible travel is welcome and encouraged, now more than ever.”
