‘Let Maui heal’: Grieving residents want tourists to go home

While the Maui wildfires became the deadliest in the U.S. in a century, the 1,500-acre resort hub of Wailea was salvaging business as best as it could.

South Maui properties from premium brands such as the Four Seasons, Hyatt, Marriott and Waldorf Astoria were advised to shelter their guests, keep the roads clear and use their hospitality infrastructure to support relief efforts.

With Lahaina in crisis, workers who could get to their jobs faced difficult decisions. For one dancer in luau shows, that meant deciding whether to show up for a shorthanded crew or spend time cooking and making Costco runs for displaced family members. Two of his siblings lost their homes. His wife’s auntie lost her life. In an interview with The Washington Post, the performer said he felt remorse over going into work. He spoke with the conditions that he remain anonymous and that his employer not be named to protect his night job.

“I shouldn’t be here,” the man said he was thinking while dancing. “Everyone that I told that I had to work, they were in shock. Like, ‘Why are you working?’ They couldn’t believe that a luau is going down. It’s embarrassing. I should be there for my community.”

As Maui reckons with catastrophe, many residents have been questioning whether the tourism businesses that fund their livelihoods should continue during a tragedy.

“There are two camps,” said Somerset Tullius, a Los Angeles resident who was born and raised on Maui and who flew home to the island the day after the fires to help her family. When she landed, she started working with the Maui Rapid Response Instagram page to coordinate relief efforts.

“One camp is, ‘Let Maui heal, we don’t need you here right now,’” Tullius continued. “And the other camp is like, ‘Hold on a second, this is my main form of income. I have to suck it up or else what else am I going to do?’”

For the luau dancer, showing up wasn’t easy.

“I could have said no, but it’s my job, and it’s my responsibility to show up for work,” he said. “But it was hard for me to do. . . . I wasn’t present while I was dancing. I could only think about my family.”

Snorkelers spark controversy

Two days after Lahaina burned to the ground, a 53-foot dive boat departed for a half-day snorkel trip about 15 miles south of the disaster site. From the highway en route to Lahaina, Miki’ala Makanamaikalani Pua’a-Freitas - a Maui native and the founder of Kapuna Farms in Waihe’e Valley - spotted the excursion and started recording the scene.

“Shame on this company right here - Maui Snorkeling,” Pua’a-Freitas said in a video she posted to her Instagram account the next day. “Look at all these tourists just frolicking in the waters off of Lahaina. Unreal.”

In the more than 700 heated comments on the post, Instagram users were divided over whether tourism should go on during a tragedy.

Mark Elmore, the owner of Maui Snorkeling, insists the publicly shamed tour wasn’t actually an example of putting profits over people. The trip, he said in an interview, had been planned before the worst of the fires, and was carried out as a fundraiser. A screenshot of a receipt reviewed by The Washington Post shows a payment of $10,265.88 to the Maui Food Bank, representing 100 percent of the trip’s profit.

“It’s really hard to serve people mai tais when your family and your friends and everyone is suffering.”

[Maui’s emergency services chief resigns following criticism for not activating sirens during fire]

Elmore’s company is working with PR Security Service, a crisis communications and management firm that focuses on reputation repair and social media response, according to the company’s website. Maui Snorkeling has posted an apology on its website and its Facebook page. The PR firm showed The Post a screenshot of a social media message from Maui Snorkeling to a customer in which the company said it was rescheduling a tour set for the day after the fires and planned to donate all proceeds from its next booking. The message has a timestamp for Aug. 9, well before the Instagram callout was filmed.

Elmore told The Post he wished he had “telegraphed our intentions a little better.” Speaking of the criticism, he said “it came fairly quick and caught me off guard, but I certainly understand.”

For locals, however, the optics of tourists snorkeling were incredibly painful.

“The boat tours that went out to Lahaina the very next day taking people snorkeling was like a stab in the heart,” April Boone, owner of the Tropical Goddess boutique inside the Andaz Maui at Wailea Resort, said in a text message.

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Boone, who has been focusing her time on volunteering with relief efforts, says the unfolding tragedy feels as devastating as a terrorist attack. She doesn’t think visitors realize the gravity of the situation, that people working in tourism are still waiting on DNA test results to see if their loved ones were among the 106 fatalities confirmed as of Wednesday morning.

“I think people should respect the Hawaiians [and] Maui and give the locals time to grieve without having to worry about interacting with extra tourists,” Boone said. “This is not Disneyland. This is our home.”

A tourism-driven economy

Even with Lahaina in ashes, tourism is inescapable in Maui.

About 70 percent of every dollar generated in Maui can be attributed to the visitor industry either directly or indirectly, according to the Maui Economic Development Board, which calls tourism “irrefutably the ‘economic engine’ for the County of Maui.” In 2022, total visitor spending on Maui was $5.69 billion, according to the Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism.

“To a degree we are so dependent on other people,” said Native Hawaiian Kaimanamālie Brummel, a former luxury concierge who’s now the director of advancement for Seabury Hall, a private school in Upcountry Maui.

“We’re dependent on people coming here and spending money. We’re dependent on ships coming here,” Brummel said. “We’re not growing our own food, and that’s really frustrating because we never wanted it to be that way.”

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Seeing vacations continue unimpeded feels like an added blow.

“The way I’ve been framing it for a really long time is people have felt entitled to our land, to our culture, to our people, and now they’re feeling entitled to our grief,” Brummel said.

As days pass, Brummel says the community is discovering additional impacts from the fires. The area is home to many eco- and farm tourism businesses, as well as restaurants that rely on travelers’ dollars. At her school, there are students and staff who have lost everything either in the Lahaina fires or those in the Upcountry.

“We were already an isolated, under-resourced community with a lot of people living on the edge of poverty, and now we’ve had this tragedy on top of that,” she said.

‘The rest of Maui is still open’

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green (D) issued an emergency proclamation Sunday declaring that nonessential travel to West Maui was “strongly discouraged.” The proclamation noted that “visitors in West Maui have largely heeded the call to leave the island, and hotels and other accommodations are needed for displaced residents and emergency workers.”

The Hawaii Tourism Authority echoed that message in an update to its website Monday, saying that the stance is in effect through this month. It noted that hotels in the area - which includes Lahaina, Napili, Kaanapali and Kapalua - have temporarily stopped taking future bookings.

But it did not warn travelers away from visiting other parts of Maui, including Kahului, Wailea, Kihei, Hana and Wailuku. Earlier advisories from officials strongly discouraged nonessential travel to the whole island and urged tourists to leave; the narrowed focus on West Maui has led to criticism as locals and advocates ask visitors to stay away. (A spokesman for the authority, T. Ilihia Gionson, did not address a question about that criticism.)

“The lack of empathy and seeming like your vacation is more important than the tragedy . . . that happened in these people’s lives - that’s what’s upsetting,” said CarrieAnn Randolph, who grew up on Oahu and left Hawaii in 2013, and still has family on the island, as well as the Big Island and Maui. Her cousin lost his Lahaina home in the wildfire.

[Hawaii residents fear losing Lahaina as fires make housing crisis worse]

Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen said during a recent news conference that the message has been to avoid West Maui, “but the rest of Maui is still open. We’re not shut down, we’ve not shipped anyone out, we’ve not asked anyone to leave.” Green, the governor, said that if no one traveled to the island, it “would be potentially catastrophic.”

“We probably would see a mass exodus from Maui,” he said.

Tourists are still arriving, lounging by resort pools and posting about their vacations on social media.

Tullius said Maui’s dependence on tourism is “very complicated” because workers need to earn money but may also resent visitors for enjoying themselves during such a dark time.

“It’s really hard to serve people mai tais when your family and your friends and everyone is suffering,” she said.

Actor Jason Momoa, who was born in Hawaii, has been one of the most prominent figures to join the chorus of local voices discouraging tourism.

“Maui is not the place to have your vacation right now. DO NOT TRAVEL TO MAUI,” he recently posted on Instagram. “Do not convince yourself that your presence is needed on an island that is suffering this deeply.”

Callback to COVID

The pleas are reminiscent of a widespread sentiment felt during the pandemic. Two years ago, as coronavirus cases rose, then-Gov. David Ige (D) asked tourists to stay away. Residents implored the visitors who did come to be respectful amid a spate of bad tourist behavior, including faking vaccination cards and trespassing into clearly marked private property.

That summer, as locals grappled with a water shortage and restrictions on Maui, “stop coming” became a rallying cry on social media. The county’s mayor asked airlines to bring fewer visitors as restaurants and other businesses struggled to keep up with an influx of tourists, the Associated Press reported.

But even with a mandatory 14-day quarantine in place from March to October 2020, then a longer-lasting “Safe Travels” program with protocols that required testing or vaccination, mainlanders continued traveling to Hawaii en masse.

“This conversation intensified during the pandemic, but has been happening for decades prior, possibly since the beginning of the hospitality industry in Hawaii,” said Maui-born Kainoa Horcajo, a cultural adviser and founder of Mo’olelo Group, a consulting firm specializing in Hawaiian culture and communications.

With the fires intensifying the conversation yet again, Horcajo has heard from both sides of the issue including some calling for a total shutdown of the tourism industry. He understands the argument but believes it would impact “massive amounts of people,” “and that’s creating another disaster where there was just one,” he said.

Business as usual?

With such arguments looming, tour operators find themselves in a double bind.

“There are so many people that have just taken off work, they’ve spent down their vacation days or their companies just closed up out of sensitivity, and they’re asking themselves, ‘We got to open back up. How do we do it in the right way?’” Horcajo said. “I don’t think there is a blanket approach.”

Pua’a-Freitas, who shared the video of the Maui Snorkeling tour, emphasized she is not opposed to tourism, but called for sensitivity.

“People will never be able to look at these beaches, these waters, these places, these spaces that brought us so much joy and happiness,” she said. “It’s also a place of remembrance for a lot of pain. We can’t just be like, ‘Oh, a few days passed, let’s go back to what we were doing.’ I’m sorry, we’re going to have to all pause and really move forward with a better conscience.”

Helen Taras, office manager of Hana Tours of Maui, says the company began running tours this weekend after being closed for a few days out of respect. “We’re heartbroken about what’s happened, but we also want to help people keep their jobs so we can help them and they can help their family and friends,” she said.

Kevin Ditamore, co-owner of the tour operator Adventure Maui, said that while his company will be donating 20 percent of the proceeds from Maui bookings for the rest of the year, they’re struggling.

“Just about everything for the first week [of the fires] was canceled, so that was a significant loss,” said Ditamore, who’s lived back and forth between Maui and Kauai for 25 years. He started his business in Lahaina; the office he rented in 2002 is now gone, as are two of the houses where he once lived.

“This also really hurts because it’s coming on the heels of the covid pandemic where we were all closed for a year,” Ditamore added. “We were just in full-blown recovery, and when this happened, it really hurt.”

Horcajo says every individual and family may have to decide for themselves what’s right. That includes tourists.

If someone does want to keep their trip to Maui, Brummel asks them to do so with empathy. Even if they’re staying in or visiting parts of the island that weren’t burned, everyone on the island has been affected heavily. “We are trying to figure out how to welcome and host people while trying to reconcile what this means for our community,” she said.

It’s not the time for a standard beach vacation, she added. Only come if you’re ready to respect the culture in addition to the island’s physical beauty.

“I need people to know that culture is based on this land and the people who live here,” she continued. “You can’t like the culture and the food without loving the people.”