Mufi's Message - January 17, 2018

​HLTA Priority Issues
This legislative session, HLTA has four priority issues we will be focusing our advocacy efforts on this legislative session: Airport Corporation, Transient Vacation Rentals, Homelessness, and Public Safety that I shared with the public on our Tourism Tuesday radio show yesterday. We recently posted the details of each issue on our website here. We have also listed our “Watch List” items detailing issues that would negatively impact our industry and could potentially be brought up during the session. If you have any questions about our priority issues or watch list, contact Jared at jhigashi@hawaiilodging.org or myself.

Lei Day
Today was the Opening Day of the State Legislature, but for those who were not able to head down to the Capitol to meet and greet your legislators, we encourage you to join HLTA at Lei Day at the Capitol this coming Monday, January 22, 2018. This year we have decided to welcome legislators with a beautiful lei provided by The Orchid Lei Company the same morning as the Governor’s State of the State Address. We will meet at the Capitol Rotunda bright and early at 7:45am so each of the legislators can have their lei on prior to entering the Chamber Floor for the State of the State Address. RSVP to join us at Lei Day here. 

HLTA Missile Alert Survey
I’m sure Saturday’s ballistic missile alert came as quite a scare to everyone. We remain thankful that the incident was indeed a false alarm, but I think we can all agree that action must be taken now more than ever to ensure that our visitors remain confident in choosing to visit our islands. As I have mentioned before, HLTA has been in the process of planning a Tourism Public Safety Conference scheduled for February 27 in response to recent reports of crimes against visitors, and I’m sure we will now be incorporating a “lessons learned” element to the workshop in response to Saturday’s event. We also sent out a brief survey to our membership to gain feedback on the emergency actions that were taken by various hotels and businesses last Saturday. Click here for the survey if you did not already fill it out. Please submit your response no later than Friday, January 19, 2018. If you would like to further discuss emergency protocols in situations such as this, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We will likely be having conversations with Hawaii Emergency Management soon to share your recommendations and gain additional feedback on what we all can do to be better prepared in an unlikely event that a disaster should occur.