The vacation rental industry on the Big Island of Hawaii is at an interesting place. Although numbers look relatively good to date for 2017, the future is a little uncertain.
Through the first half of the year in 2017 the Big Island of Hawaii has fared the best of all the islands with over a 10% increase in visitors from last year. Due to new flights among other things, the biggest increase has been in international visitors. While this is good for the Big Island as a whole, it is not necessarily good for the vacation rental industry. The international clientele typically stays in hotels rather than vacation rentals. This has proven to be true as the vacation rental occupancy has just barely risen in 2017.
On the positive side for properties such as Kolea at Waikoloa the higher end properties have seen the greatest increase of the vacation rentals with private homes seeing the largest increase in property type since 2016.
Looking forward at 2018 and beyond, the Hawaii tourism experts are very unsure on how the industry will do in Hawaii. The number of people that plan to take a trip to Hawaii in the next year as fallen in half as compared to what it normally has been at for the last 5 plus years.
The main factor in this is the current airfare. That is listed as the number one reason why people are not considering a vacation to Hawaii. The only other factor that is close is the cost of the vacation as a whole (excluding flights), which includes the cost of the vacation rental/hotel and the cost of the rental car.
What we have seen over the course of the last few months are very unstable flight prices, but they always seem to hit a reasonable point at some point and we hope that trend continues.
