Beat of Hawaii Blog

The open-top Jeep is one of the Hawaii rentals visitors picture long before they arrive. Now some models come with a warning to park outside and away from buildings, creating an unexpected problem for travelers staying at Hawaii resorts.

Longtime Hawaii visitors keep booking the trip they already call their last. Their comments reveal a deeper question about memory, change, and why goodbye is so hard.

United is testing a blocked middle seat on the aircraft family tied to Hawaii’s narrowbody future. After years of writing about our own three-seat trick, the change feels familiar: airlines are learning to sell the empty space travelers once created for themselves.

The New York Times promised Kauai’s north shore in 36 hours. The photos were stunning and the places real, but the timeline is the problem. After nearly 20 years covering Hawaii travel from Kauai, we know how this usually ends: less beach, more traffic, and a weekend spent chasing a schedule the island was never built to follow.

Most visitors never notice that Hawaii has no billboards. That’s exactly why this year’s failed bill to bring digital signs back matters.

Hawaii has a national park the public can no longer tour. The question now is not just how tours stopped, but why no public plan exists for what replaces a system built around the last patients.

Hawaii says it can’t close Maui’s only jet runway to rebuild it, but the runway is wearing out after 12 repair projects since World War II. What the state may do instead is bigger than most travelers realize.

Five more coconut rhinoceros beetles were found on Maui. A Baldwin lifeguard’s warning now feels harder to dismiss, even if the island is not infested.

While Hawaiian rolls out three Moana planes this summer, the deeper story is Hawaiian’s biggest identity moment of the year, arriving through this Disney partnership.