Kauai Visitors Want A Better Airport. Residents Draw The Line.

We stopped at Wednesday’s Lihue Airport public meeting expecting to hear more about what Hawaii wants to change at Kauai’s airport. What we found was something more interesting than another version of its modernization plans.

The state is trying to figure out how to make Lihue Airport work significantly better without making it significantly bigger. That distinction was repeated throughout the planning boards we photographed at the meeting. The Hawaii Department of Transportation says the new Lihue Airport Optimization Plan is intended to improve safety, efficiency, sustainability, and the passenger experience by making better use of the airport’s existing facilities, without expanding its footprint, among other things.

Another depiction went even further, stating that the plan focuses on optimizing and refining existing infrastructure rather than expanding or adding any gates. Proposed improvements, it says, are being sized to meet current demand. For anyone who remembers the earlier fight over expanding Lihue Airport, that now represents a very different direction.

What visitors want fixed at Lihue Airport.

The list of problems being discussed will sound familiar to anyone who has spent much time transiting Kauai’s LIH. Restrooms, holdrooms and baggage systems are all on it, along with seating, charging stations, accessibility and congestion around TSA and other passenger processing areas.

Some of those problems virtually disappear when the airport isn’t busy, and its old charm is more prominent, with LIH still feeling wonderfully easy compared with larger airports. But when several mainland flights start stacking around the same time, the weak points become painfully obvious quickly.

TSA can become so overcrowded that we’ve come close to missing flights, even with good advance planning. Seating can get very tight, baggage claim can feel clunky, old, and undersized, and the curbside area can fill with passengers looking for rental-car shuttles, rideshares, hotel transportation, or someone picking them up. It’s frequently hard to even walk through the congestion.

Earlier planning work had also looked at consolidating and enclosing TSA screening, improving baggage handling, renovating restrooms, expanding and enclosing holdrooms, and adding better passenger amenities, part of the sweeping changes coming to Lihue Airport we covered earlier. Gate 10A (BOH’s featured image) has also been mentioned, more controversially, for improvement, including a proper hold room and a passenger boarding bridge.

None of that means those changes have all been approved, and this is a work in progress. On the table remains an optimization plan, with alternatives still being evaluated and refined. But unlike a vague airport vision exercise, as was tried previously and bombed, the state is working from problems passengers already experience every day while also trying to understand community concerns related to the airport.

The part that makes this Lihue airport plan unusual.

One of the boards at Wednesday’s meeting was titled “What We’ve Heard,” summarizing community feedback received so far. Among the headings were “Upgrade Passenger Facilities,” “Improve Parking and Ground Access,” and “Preserve Kauai Character.” Then there was another heading that caught our attention and reminded us: “Limit Growth and Overtourism.”

Under that heading, the community priorities were unusually direct. Meet current demand. Avoid projects that increase visitor capacity at all. Address concerns about road, parking, and community impacts. That changes the question considerably from when the state last tried to help.

Kauai isn’t simply asking the state to modernize an old airport. The community is asking whether Hawaii can fix what doesn’t work at LIH without using those improvements to create significantly more visitor capacity. That is a much harder and more nuanced problem to address.

Kauai already clearly rejected the bigger-airport approach.

BOH readers may remember how different this conversation looked several years ago. In 2022, the planning discussion included three additional gates and a future passenger level of roughly 4.5 million annually. Those additional gates became one of the most outspoken and controversial parts of the proposal, particularly as Kauai was already wrestling with dramatically worse traffic, visitor crowding, and the broader question of how much tourism infrastructure the island can and should continue adding.

That expansion direction eventually changed. HDOT now says the current optimization plan grew directly out of feedback received during the 2022 Lihue Airport Master Plan Update, the same process that led to the 51 million in Lihue Airport funding that started arriving. Instead of simply moving ahead with the earlier approach that was rejected, the state went back and developed what it calls a more direct response to the airport’s existing problems.

The boards we saw Wednesday show just how much the direction has changed. Improve the airport, but stay within the existing footprint. Fix current deficiencies, but don’t add gates. Size the improvements around current demand rather than building new infrastructure specifically to accommodate much more future visitor growth.

Can Lihue Airport actually improve without growing?

This may be where the plan gets most challenging. The state has already identified parts of Lihue Airport as undersized, even for the passengers who use them now. At the same time, LIH continues to handle roughly 3.6 million domestic passenger movements annually.

Kauai has seen periods of significant airline seat growth, and more of that isn’t out of the question. That means the airport is being asked to improve throughput and comfort without relying on the most obvious traditional airport solution: adding terminal and gate capacity.

So where does that leave state DOT and the Lihue Airport? TSA can process passengers better. Holdrooms can be enlarged. Baggage systems can move people and bags more efficiently. Gate 10A can work more like a real gate instead of the pasted-on form it exists in now (lead photo of Alaska plane at that gate). Rental-car and curbside operations can be reorganized.

But there is still an unanswered question beneath it all: how far can those efficiency gains go if passenger demand keeps increasing? The optimization plan is intended to help answer that question, and we look forward to learning more.

Rental cars, parking and passenger pickup could change too.

Some of the improvements visitors may notice most will have little to do with the gate areas themselves. Community feedback calls for more public parking, improved transit and shuttles, clearer wayfinding and better rideshare operations.

A consolidated rental-car facility is also part of the discussion, which could bring rental-car companies together and potentially free some of their existing airport space for parking and other uses. The current car rental situation is disjointed and not optimal. It isn’t unusual to see passengers walking through the airport loop, looking for car rental locations all on an adjacent street. Some rentals are even further away.

Anyone arriving at the wrong time already knows how quickly the ground side of LIH can become overly congested. Several flights can unload hundreds of people into the same relatively small area, with passengers heading toward rental cars, Uber or Lyft, hotel transportation, and private pickups. The airport may be small by most measures, but the pressure around the curb and at other spots can feel anything but small when those arrivals overlap. That makes addressing ground transportation one of the more practical parts of this entire plan.

What people don’t want Lihue Airport to lose.

The same community feedback asking for better bathrooms, more seating, and less TSA congestion also asks the state to preserve something that is much harder to measure. LIH should still feel like old Kauai. The board specifically calls for maintaining the airport’s open-air island character, incorporating local identity, culture, and businesses, and avoiding what it calls a “mainland-style” terminal experience.

We understand exactly what all of that means. There is still something quite distinctive about stepping off a plane at Lihue and immediately feeling the warm air. The arguably funky terminal is low-rise, open, and unmistakably different from huge enclosed airports most visitors pass through on their way to the island. That same open-air design can also mean heat, limited air conditioning, and spaces that don’t work well when the airport gets crowded.

The challenge at hand is figuring out whether LIH can have better restrooms, better seating, more charging, improved TSA, better baggage handling and some air-conditioned spaces without turning it into the kind of airport Kauai never wanted in the first place and likely neither do visitors.

Even Kauai helicopter tour operations made the airport list.

The community feedback also extends beyond commercial airline passengers. HDOT says it heard concerns about responsible growth in air-tour operations, whether helicopter activities should be relocated or better separated, and how noise and community compatibility should be addressed.

There is no final proposal on that yet. But its presence in planning is another reminder that Lihue Airport’s issues don’t stop at the terminal. What happens at LIH affects roads, neighborhoods, parking, noise, and the larger question of how much airport activity Kauai wants to and can accommodate overall.

Where the Lihue Airport plan stands now.

Nothing presented so far should be mistaken for a final package. Some of that early work already overlapped with Lihue Airport changes already rolling out through 2026. According to the timeline presented at the meeting, the planning team has been working since early 2025 to define the airport’s needs, collect data, and develop initial concepts.

The next phase, from now through November 2026, involves refining those alternatives, preparing a draft plan, and holding another public meeting. The final Lihue Airport Optimization Plan is expected during the period from November 2026 through February 2027. That means there is still a long way to go from what we saw on the boards this week to what passengers may eventually experience at LIH.

But the direction is clearer now than it has been in years. The community is telling the state not to solve its airport problems by simply building a larger airport to accommodate more visitors. Whether Hawaii can actually accomplish its intended and largely much-needed improvements while adhering to community desires may be the most interesting part of this entire plan.

For those of you who fly through Lihue Airport, what are the three things you would fix first, and what is the one thing you would never want LIH to lose?

Photo Credits: © Beat of Hawaii.

By Rob and Jeff, Beat of Hawaii.

Some of the most meaningful parts of Hawaii are the ones visitors walk right past without knowing they are there. We’ve spent nearly 20 years finding them firsthand for BOH as full-time Hawaii residents reporting on travel, culture, and island life, and telling you what they mean for your trip. Join us →