HANAMA’ULU — Just five years ago, when sales receipts didn’t even cover the business van payment, Bob Jasper and Jerri Wassink of Hawai’i Movie Tours, Inc. thought their good idea was about to crash and burn. After doing local research
HANAMA’ULU — Just five years ago, when sales receipts didn’t even cover the business van payment, Bob Jasper and Jerri Wassink of Hawai’i Movie Tours, Inc. thought their good idea was about to crash and burn.
After doing local research and getting favorable feedback from visitors and residents that a tour of locations on the island where movies like “South Pacific” and “Jurassic Park” were filmed would be a winner, the $11,000 in sales in 1996 was a sobering reality check for the partners.
“We didn’t think we were going to make it,” Jasper said. “It was pretty scary in the beginning,” the partners thinking the business was a bad idea.
Banking on the popularity of “Jurassic Park” to fuel a movie-tour business turned out to be a big — but correctable — mistake, as older visitors wanted to see locations used for “Blue Hawai’i,” “South Pacific” and other vintage releases.
“When we started the tour, we figured ‘Jurassic Park’ was so hot that just everybody would want to see where that was filmed. Even our trademark, our service mark, was ‘Where Your Jurassic Journey Begins,'” Jasper said.
“As it turned out, we were wrong. And there were really just a select few, mostly younger people, who had an interest in ‘Jurassic Park,'” he continued.
“So we took a closer look at what our demographics were, and they were more middle-aged, 25 to 75, and it’s really the older movies it turned out they wanted to see,” Jasper said.
“So we just totally redirected the tour, changed our logo from the ‘Jurassic’ one to ‘Kaua’i Through Hollywood’s Eyes,'” he continued.
The redirection worked, to the tune of $109,000 in sales in 1997, $255,000 in 1998 and $613,000 last year.
The company has grown from one van, with Wassink driving and taking care of company business on the cellular phone and Jasper narrating, to a five-vehicle enterprise readying to order two additional buses and possibly even expanding to O’ahu, currently with 14 employees.
“We just see nothing but tremendous growth,” with the increasing number of visitors fueling that boom, he said. People who are frequent island visitors who thought they had seen everything there was to see on the island are amazed at the new places the tour takes them.
“It’s just really a totally different way to look at the island,” he said.
Kama’aina also take the tour, with Kaua’i travel agents and others who have lived on the island all their lives never before going to some of the places the tour visits, said Jasper, 55.
A new tour will utilize 15-passenger, four-wheel-drive vans specially built for the company, and will include for the first time the Rice family ranch at Kipu.
The tours, he said, have been successful because they are so “radically different,” something that hasn’t been done other places around the world.
“And we’re getting just a ton of worldwide press, and film crews that come in from all over the world to film the tour,” including “The Discovery Channel,” which recently shot the tour for a fall show.
National Geographic and Sunset magazines have shown interest in doing stories and features on the tour, maybe because movie-tour businesses are such a rare thing in the world.
“Because it’s so unusual, and surprising to me that nobody has done something like this elsewhere — combining video clips at the locations with a lot of background, and getting people involved in the action,” he said.
“At times we’ve actually handed out scripts to people and have our guests do different parts, act out a scene. But we’ve kind of backed off of that more towards the singing,” with tour guests singing songs from “South Pacific.” “It’s just really fun. It’s filled with a lot of humor,” he added.
Guests comment continually that they’re amazed that they haven’t seen anything like the tour before, he said.
“It’s just a whole lot of interaction. It’s not just taking somebody somewhere and pointing at it.” Last year, the tour hosted between 9,000 and 10,000 people, with the smaller vans at 100 percent occupancy. At the start of this year, the company doubled its available tour seats, with no let-up in demand.
“It really surprises me how fast it’s growing, and the demand for what we’re doing is just kind of knocking our socks off,” he said.
The vans and buses stop at Hanama’ulu Bay (“Donovan’s Reef”), Coco Palms (“Blue Hawai’i”), Moloa’a Bay (“Gilligan’s Island”), Papa’a Bay (“Six Days, Seven Nights”), and many other locations.
The Kaua’i Visitors Bureau, county Film Commission and Mayor Maryanne Kusaka have given tremendous support to the business, with Kusaka and Gov. Ben Cayetano offering letters of support when the company sought state Public Utilities Commission permission to operate the business, Jasper said.
The growth of the company has placed it number seven on the Pacific Business News list of the state’s fastest-growing businesses, “Hawai’i’s Fastest 50.” First Hawaiian Bank and PricewaterhouseCoopers co-sponsor “Hawai’i’s Fastest 50.” Other Kaua’i businesses on the list include Island Soap Company LLC of Kapa’a (15th, with a sales increase of 223 percent from 1997 to 1999), Classic Aloha Vacations, Inc. of Hanalei (20th, with a sales increase of 171 percent from 1997 to 1999), and Aloha Furniture Warehouse in Lihu’e (37th, with a sales increase of 82 percent).
