$238 To Hawaii Vs $70 To Europe’s Hawaii. Who Decided That.

Flights to Hawaii currently start around $238 roundtrip in basic economy from Los Angeles to Honolulu, for example. That’s a price many travelers now see as the floor, even though it’s no real deal. By contrast, we recently took a nearly four-hour flight from London to Madeira, often called the Hawaii of Europe, which cost just $70 roundtrip.

We checked the distance next, because that’s the obvious explanation, right? London to Madeira is about 1,540 miles each way, while Los Angeles to Honolulu is closer to 2,550. But even accounting for that difference, Hawaii still costs more than twice as much per mile flown. Distance narrows the gap some, but it doesn’t explain it.

What matters is that Hawaii has become a market where the entry price itself feels like a bigger commitment. Before dates are set, before you’ve moved out of basic economy, before you’ve secured a seat that isn’t in the middle, or anything else, the meter already feels like it’s running.

The price gap exists far before any add-ons even start.

It’s tempting to dismiss this price gap as a baggage-fee or some seat assignment illusion. Bags cost extra, seats cost extra, food costs extra, and boarding earlier than the last group costs extra, too. That is the reality everywhere now, and Hawaii flyers experience that to the same degree as European travelers do.

Those add-ons don’t explain what separates a $70 starting point from a $238 to begin with. Those of us who fly frequently already know that, because we pay those fares and added fees no matter where we fly. What separates the two is that Hawaii’s starting price is already doing more damage, before bags, seats, or anything else enter the picture.

Distance sounds logical until you look closely.

Hawaii is far, Madeira is closer, and that seems like it should settle things until you check more closely.

London to Madeira runs about four hours in the air. Los Angeles to Honolulu isn’t dramatically longer, and for most travelers, both fall into the same mental category when planning time off and an island vacation. These aren’t fundamentally different journeys in the way that true ultra-long-haul flights are.

If distance were the real reason, Hawaii wouldn’t keep ending up on the expensive side of these comparisons. Yet it does, over and over.

Hawaii itself doesn’t control prices as people think it does.

When airfare feels punishing, Hawaii tends to absorb the blame by default. State fees, state politics, state messaging, and even state “attitude” get folded into the explanation because they’re visible and close to home.

On airfare, Hawaii mostly watches from the sidelines. The state doesn’t decide which airlines serve which routes, doesn’t approve mergers, and doesn’t control prices or how many competitors survive in any given market. It also doesn’t decide whether new entrants are welcomed, tolerated, or quietly squeezed out.

Those decisions live at the federal level, and they always have. That even when the consequences land directly on the islands.

Who decides how many airlines meaningfully compete in Hawaii markets matters more than any individual fare sale. Who reviews and approves consolidation, and who signals whether fewer, larger carriers are acceptable outcomes, points directly to Washington rather than to Honolulu.

Regardless of how anyone feels, each approved consolidation narrows the field, and each narrowing reduces how aggressively airlines need to price to defend island market share, especially on Hawaii routes where travelers have limited alternatives.

Europe kept competition alive. Hawaii didn’t.

Airlines price what the market will bear, and on Hawaii routes, that ceiling has drifted higher over time with far less pressure to stimulate demand than was once the case.

It’s also not just geography. Plenty of island routes elsewhere operate under similar constraints but do not produce the same kind of pricing floor that Hawaii now has. The difference is in how much competition is allowed to survive and how often airlines are forced to fight for passengers rather than simply hold the line.

One difference that doesn’t get talked about much is airports themselves. In much of Europe, airports actively compete for airline service, often cutting deals or lowering costs to attract routes. In the U.S., most airports are publicly run and don’t compete with each other in that way, which removes another layer of pressure that might otherwise cause airlines to price more aggressively. That difference doesn’t explain everything, but it helps reveal why base fares behave so differently.

Over time, federal decisions narrowed that pressure on Hawaii routes. With fewer meaningful competitors, there’s less incentive to run aggressive fare sales, and prices don’t need to drop as often to fill planes. That shift is exactly why, as we detailed in Booking Hawaii Airfare: “First” Is Dead — So Are The Sales, the kind of frequent, meaningful sales that once softened the cost of Hawaii trips have largely disappeared. Europe took a different path, and travelers feel the result every time they search for a flight.

This isn’t really about any airline in particular.

Airlines price what the market allows them to price, and Hawaii routes have gradually become a place where prices don’t need to come down at all very often to work. That didn’t happen overnight or by accident, but the result is simple enough to see every time travelers search for flights.

What this looks like in practice is simple.

For many travelers, airfare is now one of the first things that trips them up, not the last thing they deal with. It used to start with the idea of going to Hawaii, and then people worked backward into dates and costs, starting with flights. Now it often begins with accommodations, such that the very ideas of a Hawaii vacation sometimes never really get off the ground between those two expenses.

We see it in comments that end with “we’ll see” instead of dates on a calendar. We hear from readers who still want to come to Hawaii but are quietly choosing somewhere else more often, not because they’ve lost interest, but because the math, including airfare, just stopped lining up.

And it’s not just visitors. It hits residents, families, neighbor island travel, and anyone who needs to cross the Pacific without airfares swallowing so much of the budget before the trip even begins.

There’s no nice fix hiding here; that’s not really the point.

This is about being honest about where the decisions actually get made and how Hawaii ended up priced the way it is. It didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen because one airline woke up and decided to stick it to travelers. A lot of small choices added up over time, and now they show up whenever someone searches for a flight to Hawaii.

If you’re trying to make sense of why Hawaii airfare doesn’t behave like Madeira or other island routes, starting with distance or baggage fees won’t get you far. Those explanations sound good, but they don’t fully add up. You have to look at how competition thinned out and how often prices stopped needing to move to do their job.

So when you go checking Hawaii airfares now, the real question usually isn’t whether they feel expensive. It’s whether the market still feels competitive at all, or whether it has quietly figured out just how high it can go before people stop pushing back and changing their plans.