Recovery of Tourism in Hawaii After the COVID-19 Pandemic: Arrivals and Trip Purposes

This paper examines the recovery of Hawaii’s tourism after the COVID-19 pandemic using seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) models with intervention analysis. The intervention analysis combined with the SARIMA models was explicitly designed to assess the changes in time series data after the specific event of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed monthly Hawaii tourism data, including the numbers of domestic arrivals and arrivals for various trip purposes before and after the pandemic as well as estimated the recovery time for each trip purpose. The results revealed that although the number of total arrivals has returned to pre-pandemic levels, arrivals for different trip purposes have bounced back at different rates. The number of arrivals for personal purposes fully recovered by December 2022, but arrivals for business purposes need more time. Thus, differences in recovery rates after a significant social event have important implications for the tourism industry and policymakers.