You know this complaint, you’ve heard it before, maybe you’ve said it yourself:
“Tourism here turned the Islands into a theme park, commodifying the Indigenous culture that those same colonial forces had previously pushed toward extinction. Hula, once prohibited, is now an iconic experience. Can you even say you went to Hawaiʻi if you didn’t see a show?
Dancers in grass skirts keep smiling for an audience watching through the screens of their phones, recording the performance for social media to prove they were there. Tourism glorifies Hawaiian culture, but not Hawaiian people. Yet Hawaiʻi cannot abandon this precious cash cow because the economy will suffer if the dancing stops.
The industry is projected to bring in $860 million in tax revenue this year, down from $1.1 billion in 2023. Hospitality leaders are already begging the state for “dramatic changes” and “increased marketing.”
Tourism is, in this author’s words, a pattern of “elitism, entitlement, exploitation, extraction.”
I’ve seen variations of this lament for decades. This specific iteration I’ve quoted was just posted by our friends at Honolulu Civil Beat, written by columnist Jenny “Jeta” Tang.
Tang is, her bio notes, “an interdisciplinary artist and creative technologist based in Honolulu. Her work has been showcased at Burning Man, where she was the only registered artist from Hawaiʻi in 2025.”
That’s very cool, I’m happy for her and I hope she flew to California, enjoyed the unique natural wonders of the playa and really celebrated that opportunity. I don’t have a bone to pick with her, I generally like her column.
It’s that particular complaint itself, issued so often, by so many of us. Here’s the big problem with all of our grumbling about tourists coming here:
We travel. A lot.
In 2024, the most recent year for which there is data, the Hawai‘i State Data Book tells us that 1.5 million kama‘āina returned from domestic trips to the Mainland, and about 277,000 returned from foreign destinations. That’s a total of 1.8 million residents who came home from a trip somewhere that year and of course, that’s more than our population of 1.4 million because some people took multiple trips.
When we travel, we expect there to be jet fuel in the plane and a flight attendant to bring us snackies. We expect hotels to exist, with desk clerks and housekeepers, so we can check in and drop our jet-lagged bodies into some clean sheets.
We expect tour guides and docents. We expect restaurants staffed with waiters — good grief, we even call them servers — bussers, cooks, dishwashers. We expect locavore menus, which means armies of farmers working whatever land we’ve flown to. We expect shops filled with authentic trinkets labored over by local artisans (or an affordable made-in-China facsimile). We expect the culture of wherever we’re visiting to express itself to us in some pleasant, convenient, digestible way. We expect the Japanese to be all Japanese-y for us, the French to be snobbishly French, the Germans to be gruffly Teutonic, the Las Vegans to be all … I dunno, gamble-y … with us, and the New Yorkers to be amusingly surly.
“That pretzel guy called me an a**hole! OMG I love it, that’s so New York!”
So, unless the complainer has taken a vow of travel poverty and committed himself or herself to spending the rest of their lives on these lovely Pacific islands, going nowhere, extracting nothing, exploiting no one, I just don’t want to hear this variety of Marxist-lite grumbling. Look at those words again:
“Elitism, entitlement, exploitation, extraction.”
These are academic buzzwords, expressions of dogma, almost meaningless as instruments of understanding. And speaking of hypocrisy, travel for academic conferences is itself a $1.5-billion industry, expected to grow to $2.1 billion by next year.
These academics fly. They fly to conferences, stay in hotels, play tourist on their free time — and complain about other people who fly while pitying the people who serve them.
I don’t know what is wrong with academics, writers and artists that they can look at a housekeeper and see only an object of pity. Do they not understand work? (That question perhaps answers itself.) Do they not understand that everyone working for a living, at every social class, is serving someone else?
Are you an architect with a demanding client? You’re serving.
Are you a tax account with 250 customers all needing their tax returns completed at the same time and each one thinking their tax picture is a special case? You’re serving.
Are you a developer driving from an appointment with skeptical financial backers to a neighborhood board meeting where every NIMBY is going to verbally smack you around? You’re serving.
Are you a doctor, with anxious patients who show up armed with the worst medical advice they could find on Reddit and who second-guess your care? You’re serving.
We cannot use this “exploitation/extraction/oppression” complaint. It gets us nowhere. The fact is, humanity would be better off if every single one of us had a comfortable, middle-class life or better, with some leisure time for a vacation.
We want that, yes? Global prosperity? I do!
Doesn’t the left want something like that, as well, as it argues ceaselessly for taking money from some people so that others have more? Or is their offer nothing more than free subsistence living for the masses, a carbon-neutral proletariat trapped in 15-minute cities? (These questions also answer themselves.)
Where there is a real problem with the absolute good of a growing global tourism market, it’s the numbers. That’s worth talking about. We don’t like feeling crowded here at home by our annual visitor count. We don’t like feeling crowded when we travel and find ourselves in a crush of people all visiting the same greatest hits of scenic views and must-see attractions. It’s a thing to be managed — a First World problem, as they say, and good for us if that’s our problem.
That conversation is healthy and functional, and never-ending, because the numbers and the pricing to control it will always be in flux. Let’s have that conversation instead.
A. Kam Napier is editor in chief of Aloha State Daily. His opinions in Pipikaula Corner are his own and not reflective of the ASD team.
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