Is Hawaii Anti-Tourist? We Just Spent Two Months Stress-Testing That.

If you spend even a little time researching a Hawaii trip right now, a pattern shows up fast. Reddit threads warn visitors to stay away. Comment sections are filled with stories about shaming and hostility. TikTok videos frame the islands as resentful, fed up, and tired of outsiders. “Haole go home” has become shorthand for a much bigger idea about what visiting Hawaii is supposed to feel like now.

That idea is no longer just online chatter. It is changing real behavior. We hear from readers who have canceled trips, skipped Hawaii entirely, or quietly rerouted vacations to other countries. Others tell us they arrived already on edge, apologetic before anything even happened, unsure how they would be received just for being there.

The anxiety has moved past prices and crowds into something more basic. Visitors want to know to what degree they are still welcome, and what they should expect to encounter. Anyone paying attention to Hawaii travel coverage or online discussion has run into it repeatedly, whether they were looking for it or not.

Given how much we’ve covered visitor frustration over the past few years, it would be easy to assume where this story is headed. We did too. That assumption didn’t hold up as we traveled around Maui, the Big Island, and Oahu in December. We decided to check it out ourselves after an encounter we had in October.

The moment that made it personal.

On a flight from Chicago to Los Angeles in late October, on our way back to Hawaii, we overheard a conversation in the row in front of us. Three passengers were casually bouncing between destinations, talking about future travel plans the way people often do mid-flight. Our ears perked up when Hawaii came up briefly, and one of them said flatly, “They do not want us there anymore.”

The other passenger’s response was immediate. “Forget Hawaii,” they said (using an expletive), then added they were going to Fiji instead. There was no hesitation, no debate, and no follow-up discussion. It was an earful.

They did not know we could hear them, and they were not performing for anyone. This was not a social media argument or a comment-section pile-on. It was a real travel decision being made in real time, based entirely on a belief about how Hawaii feels toward visitors now.

We landed back in Hawaii shortly after that flight and then began moving around the islands for end-of-2025 destination reporting. That short exchange stayed with us as we got to work and started traveling again.

Why we were paying attention.

The travel we did from then until the end of December was not designed as a sentiment experiment at all. We were on the ground working, writing destination coverage as we did with our recent Mama’s Fish House review, moving between islands, driving rental cars, staying in different places, and spending long days out in public spaces. Kauai, where we live. Oahu, multiple times. Maui. The Big Island. We traveled during the peak holiday season and during quieter stretches in between.

Because of our nature as travel writers, from that comment we heard off-handedly at the start of this, and more, we were, in hindsight, paying added attention. We were not looking for confrontation, and we were not announcing anything to anyone, but we were watching how everyday interactions actually unfolded. We spent time in obvious visitor zones and in places tourists are often warned about. Local beaches, small towns, rural Maui, East Hawaii, grocery stores, gas stations, parking lots, eateries, and the unremarkable places where friction usually shows up first.

Earlier, that attention had felt warranted. When we visited Maui in fall 2024, about a year after the Lahaina wildfire and while the island was still very much in recovery mode, something felt off. Nothing overt happened, and there was no single incident to point to, but the tone felt flatter and less welcoming than what we were used to. It did not feel hostile, and was not unexpected under the circumstances, but it was noticeable enough that we talked about it and did not wave it away.

So when we returned on a statewide travel sweep a year later, the question lingered in the background. Was that feeling still there, or had something shifted yet again?

What we expected to encounter.

Based on everything circulating online, we would not have been surprised to run into something. A sign. A comment. A moment at a beach or in a parking lot where it became clear that visitors were no longer as welcome as they once were. If anti-tourist sentiment had really become more widespread, it seemed reasonable that it would surface somewhere over nearly two months of moving around the state.

We were especially alert in the places most often cited by visitors. These were not random stops or resort corridors, but everyday settings where visitors tend to feel exposed or uncertain about belonging. If widespread anti-tourist sentiment existed, this is where we expected it to surface.

We were not there trying to test boundaries, but were simply doing what travelers do, even ones from another island, while paying attention to the tone around us.

What happened over nearly two months.

Not once did we experience an incident that would support the idea that Hawaii is broadly anti-tourist right now. There were no confrontations, no shaming, and no moments where we felt unwelcome for simply being there. Not in any way. As the weeks went on, the absence of incidents became impossible to ignore.

We are haole, and we drove rental cars throughout the trip. We did not try to blend in or disguise ourselves. Over the course of the travel period, we easily had more than 100 routine interactions with people. What we got ranged from neutral to genuinely warm.

We did the full Road to Hana, including the back road, during busy periods. We saw cones where parking would have been dangerous and congestion where congestion usually exists, but we did not encounter the hostility or tension we had heard of. We went to local beaches where we half-expected awkwardness or friction and found none. In Hilo and elsewhere on the Big Island, everyday interactions were unremarkable in the best possible Hawaii way.

We did not see a single “haole go home” sign, or anything like that. We did not experience even low-grade resentment directed at us for being visitors. At some point midway through the trip, we both acknowledged what was becoming clear: whatever we had been bracing for simply was not happening.

The only tension we consistently saw.

The only places where tension reliably surfaced were high-volume sites like Haleakala and Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Even there, what stood out was neither resentment nor bad visitor behavior so much as infrastructure that was clearly not built to absorb the sheer number of people being sent through it. Parking constraints, traffic backups, and unclear flow created friction that had little to do with attitude or intent.

What looked like bad behavior was often visitors reacting to congestion and confusing systems in fragile places. That dynamic was frustrating, but it felt structural rather than personal. It explained why irritation can occur in certain popular settings, but it still did not suggest that visitors were being singled out simply for showing up.

Where the internet and Hawaii’s reality diverge.

None of this erases Hawaii’s underlying challenges. Housing costs remain high, infrastructure is strained and inadequate, traffic is still traffic, and environmental pressure has not gone away. Those issues were clearly visible everywhere we traveled.

What stood out was the gap between an online narrative and what we actually experienced on the ground across four islands in late 2025. One statistic often cited by the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau helps explain why that gap can grow so wide. Most negative Maui posts during a recent analysis period came from people who did not live in Hawaii, which helps explain how perceptions can become louder than on-the-ground experiences.

Our working theory isn’t complicated. More than two years have passed since the Maui fires, and the initial wave of grief, anger, and extreme social media amplification has cooled. Financial reality has also reasserted itself, as tourism remains the only significant economic engine across the state. A vocal minority that feels deeply anti-tourist still exists, but it appears far smaller on the ground than it looks online, and we did not encounter it at all over nearly two months of deliberate, statewide travel.

What this does and does not mean.

This does not erase anyone’s bad experiences, nor does it invalidate people who felt unwelcome earlier or in specific situations. Those experiences are real, and BOH readers have shared plenty of them.

What it does mean is that a powerful belief is still circulating right now that appears to be changing travel decisions in ways that no longer match what many visitors will actually experience when they arrive. While we heard that belief redirected a trip to Fiji before we even started exploring, we then spent months on the ground failing to see it play out in real life.

That mismatch is important. It shapes who comes, who stays away, and how people show up before they even land.

If you have traveled to Hawaii recently, was it something that happened on the ground, or something you carried with you before you arrived?

Photo Credits: All from Beat of Hawaii. The lead photo is Old Kona Airport Beach.