13:03 EDT Wednesday 9/25/2002Tourism Soars on Lanai, Molokai
While statewide visitor days are running below last year’s level, this has been a boom tourism year for the islands of Lanai and Molokai. August visitor statistics from the state show that both islands got twice as many visitors in August 2002 as in August 2001. While visitors to other islands are measured in hundreds of thousands per month, Molokai got 13,109 in August (up 126 percent) and Lanai got 14,898 (up 117 percent). On both islands, a third of all visitors are international. International arrivals to Molokai ran double last year and on Lanai they were quadruple year-ago levels.
The two islands, so close that each one dominates the horizon of the other from the nearest shores, could not be more different. Lanai, once a Dole pineapple plantation, is home to two of the most famous and acclaimed luxury hotels in the world, a haven for upscale visitors who want to golf and be pampered. Molokai is "old Hawaii," an easy-paced island that has not a single traffic light, where night life consists of walking through an alley to the back door of the Kanemitsu Bakery to buy hot bread out the back door at midnight.
With more than 80 percent of Hawaii’s population living on Oahu, and most state media based there, sometimes less attention is paid to the Big Island, Maui and Kauai, and coverage of Maui County tends to focus on the island of Maui more than these other islands that are part of the same jurisdiction. But while international tourism is down 20 percent statewide, it has been a very different story this summer on Molokai and Lanai.
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