West Maui tourism restart brings broader business recovery

KAANAPALI, Maui >> Maricris De Los Reyes smiles as she rings up customers at the ABC Store at Whaler’s Village, which closed after the deadly Aug. 8 Maui wildfires and couldn’t reopen until the visitors started coming back to West Maui.

The Lahaina resident has sustained lots of losses. The home where she and her fiance and two children lived with other family members burned. The Lahaina Cannery ABC Store where she worked wasn’t one of the three ABC Stores on Maui that turned to ash; however, it was damaged in the fire and is still closed.

De Los Reyes said she and her family barely made it out of the fire, and still have further to go to reach stability and healing. But she is thankful for the reopening of West Maui tourism, which gave her the opportunity for a job at the ABC Store at Whaler’s Village in Kaanapali until the Lahaina Cannery store where she has worked half her life reopens.

“I’m glad this one reopened. I told the tourists, ‘Thank you for coming,’” De Los Reyes said. “We have to think positively. Not always negatively. When we left the fire, we only had two pairs of clothes. My daughter didn’t have slippers. I told her, ‘We can always replace that when Mommy goes back to work.’”

The phased-in tourism reopening in West Maui, which started Oct. 8, gave businesses the chance to begin recovering from the severe economic downturn.

Arrivals to Maui plummeted 57% to 94,221 visitors in September, while spending plunged 52.6% to $203.2 million, according to preliminary data from the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.

DBEDT’s estimate that tourism contributes 29% in direct economic impacts to Maui — and nearly 38% if all ripple impacts are included — illustrates the importance of a visitor industry recovery for all business sectors.

Since the Nov. 1 tourism reopening of all of West Maui, the region is finally showing indications that a fragile recovery has begun. Still, balancing the various community interests that have emerged since the fires remains a challenge.

Lahaina Strong, a grassroots organization focused on the historic town’s recovery, peppered the public access portion of Kaanapali Beach in front of Whaler’s Village with tents and fishing poles Friday and members said they intend to stay there exercising their traditional rights until Maui Mayor Richard Bissen and Gov. Josh Green solve Maui’s growing housing crisis.

They are urging Bissen and Green to convert the thousands of transient vacation rentals and short-term rentals in West Maui into long-term rentals. They also want rent controls and protections such as immediate mortgage deferral for all homes lost in the fire.

Some Lahaina Strong members already have slept on the beach, and the group indicated that more tents will likely go up to house displaced residents. They said they chose such a highly visible place to highlight the urgency of the housing crisis.

They say they are prioritizing “local need over corporate greed.” This mantra has made visitor industry officials nervous that the “Fish-In For Dignified Housing” could make visitors feel unwelcome, which could delay recovery and perpetuate the cycle of job losses.

Junlynn Ii, Lahaina Strong operation’s lead, said “It’s a hard toss right now. There’s a lot of people who need to financially go back to work because they couldn’t get FEMA, they couldn’t get SBA, they couldn’t get unemployment. They had no choice but to go back to work, but it doesn’t mean that they are happy being there.”

Ii said she used to work at as a condominium hotel cleaner, but didn’t go back after the fire.

“I didn’t feel like it was OK for me to go clean a room for a tourist to come in while I probably knew this person that got kicked out,” she said.

Many hotel industry and government officials are at odds with Lahaina Strong’s assertion that the return of visitors is displacing fire evacuees.

But the complexity of Maui’s housing shortage brings overlapping concerns that have ramifications for businesses. As tourism returns and more businesses reopen, the lack of workforce housing could stall growth.

Despite these continuing challenges, West Maui’s business recovery has begun.

Popular restaurants in Whaler’s Village were packed Friday night, and in some cases were even busier than they had been earlier in the week before Lahaina Strong’s tents and fishing pools went up.

Visitors gathered on the lawn in front of the Sea Maui booth on Nov. 6 to go on a sunset catamaran cruise. Operations manager Taylor Rigsby said business really started picking up about a week ago.

“We’ve been able to bring employees back and give them more hours. That’s been really important because we had a handful of employees that had to go off island. Unemployment is not great for tipped workers,” Rigsby said. “Once the restaurants starting picking up, we got busier, too.”

On Tuesday evening, the newly reopened Monkeypod Kitchen by Merriman’s drew so many customers that lines snaked around the building. Hula Grill Kaanapali was packed, too. It almost looked normal except for the sign at the entrance reminding diners to have patience, and not to ask employees about the fires that devastated the community.

While the luxury Kapalua is much quieter than Kaanapali, deli lines have been getting longer at the Honolua Store in the resort town and more patrons are dining on Taverna’s lanai.

Traffic along the Honoapiilani Highway has also picked up. A sign went up last week advertising that Mexican food truck 808Antojitos is now open in the Lahaina Cannery Mall, where anchor tenants Safeway and Longs Drugs reopened in September.

Paul Kosasa, president and CEO of ABC Stores, said over 50 employees were left out of work by the fire, which burned three of the company’s stores, and resulted in the closure of the Lahaina Cannery ABC Store.

“We are going through the logistics of cleaning (the Lahaina Cannery store) up, and we don’t have water over there. But we will reopen. Our effort is to bring people back to work and try to give them hours,” he said.

Kosasa said ABC Stores now has three West Maui stores open, including at Whaler’s Village, Honokawai and Kapalua.

“Most of the customers are emergency and aid workers, it’s slowly changing to visitors,” he said. “Obviously, we aren’t going to get back to the way that we were because it’s just impossible. But whatever trickle of visitors do come back is a good sign. There’s room for optimism.”

Toni Marie Davis, executive director for the Activities & Attractions Association of Hawaii Inc., said so many businesses have been struggling since the fire that A3H’s board of directors approved refunding over $32,000 in membership dues to 42 members across Maui.

“Many businesses experienced a direct hit from the fires and are closed indefinitely. Others were affected indirectly as most of our livelihood depends on the visitor industry. As the numbers (of visitors) plummeted over the last few months, the hardships on our island community multiplied as they rippled across our economy,” Davis said.

Still, she said, hope is on the horizon with the gradual return of visitors.

“Kapalua Zipline reopened last week, bringing employees back to work and reporting healthy customer numbers. A Maui hiking business reported a profit in October partly due to operating at lower capacity and adjusting to fewer visitors,” Davis said. “Other companies have shared they are open and running at a 30% loss, but at least their employees have work. All are praying that the community comes together to recognize the value of the visitor industry to our economy, like it or not.”