LIHU’E – Mayor Maryanne Kusaka, people who commute to O’ahu daily to work, even veteran Kaua’i promoter Walter “Freckles” Smith, don’t have anything on the self-proclaimed Kaua’i Visitors Bureau “road warrior.” Edie Hafdahl, KVB director of marketing and a certified
LIHU’E – Mayor Maryanne Kusaka, people who commute to O’ahu daily to work, even veteran Kaua’i promoter Walter “Freckles” Smith, don’t have anything on the self-proclaimed Kaua’i Visitors Bureau “road warrior.”
Edie Hafdahl, KVB director of marketing and a certified meeting professional, has racked up over 100,000 air miles over the first seven months this year.
By comparison, a person who travels to O’ahu five times a week to work does 200 miles a day, 1,000 a week, and just 52,000 a year if he or she doesn’t take a vacation.
Hafdahl, who didn’t travel much before taking her current position over four years ago, now spends about one third of her calendar year traveling to promote Kaua’i and Hawai’i at locations as diverse as Denver, Munich, Brisbane, Sydney, Auckland, Berlin, Copenhagen and Kuala Lumpur.
Before the year is over, she will have visited Portland, Long Beach, Chicago, Seville, London and Tokyo. Ironically, her late November sojourn to the Japan Association of Travel Agents conference will be her first-ever visit to that important market.
“It seems I’m gone a lot more than I’m here,” she said during a brief stop home this month before she jets off later this month to Portland, Ore., to continue calling on tour operators and wholesalers in what is still the vitally important West Coast market.
While only on the road about one-third of the year, she’ll still travel on KVB business once a month each month except December this year. December is her vacation month, when she checks out various activities on Kaua’i that she talks about to people all over the world when she’s not home.
As expected, Hafdahl, 45, racks up thousands of frequent-flyer miles, which she routinely redeems for upgrades into more comfortable seats for transatlantic flights which for her follow transpacific and transcontinental ones.
A routing like Lihu’e to Honolulu to San Francisco to Chicago to London, and back, isn’t uncommon.
As you might also expect, she has pre-flight and in-flight routines. As you may not expect, though, she still gets pre-flight anxiety and jitters, even though a big part of her job is traveling for a living.
She uses essentially every room in her large Pua Ko home during methodical packing. She travels light, and as other experienced travelers will tell you allows for the unexpected.
“I always plan that my luggage is going to be lost for 24 hours,” which means packing certain essentials into carry-on bags in the event of lost luggage.
While she can quickly calculate her air mileage for the year and has her whole year’s travel itinerary memorized, she admitted she oftentimes can’t remember her hotel room number when the porter asks her, as she changes hotels and rooms nearly as frequently as others change underwear.
Numerous yellow-paper adhesive notes (when to pay bills, make deposits, etc.) for husband Palmer Hafdahl, an architect who designed and built their home, and cooking and leaving in the freezer a trip’s worth of meals for him to thaw and enjoy while she’s gone, are part of her pre-flight rituals.
“I have a lot of anxiety before” traveling, she confessed.
Her husband is very self-reliant, which almost goes without saying since his wife is gone at least once a month. He has their cat to keep him company, she laughed.
Just as regimented as her pre-flight routine is, her on-board demeanor is well rehearsed, too: two pillows, one for the neck and one for the lower back; lots of water; an aisle seat (you know what lots of water means, don’t you?); lotions to keep her skin moist; spray to do the same for her face; lubricating oil for her hair; gel to keep her nostrils from drying up.
She is very good at being able to sleep on airplanes, something she credits at least in part to the pillows.
A vitamin regimen, and regular exercise routine at home and on the road, help keep her healthy while traveling. “I want to do this for a long time,” said Hafdahl, who is still fascinated by traveling even when it’s for work.
She manages to learn about every destination she visits, even picking up enough of necessary foreign languages to be able to communicate and get around in non-English-speaking places.
While she can relate to the horror story that was one recent New York-to-Honolulu charter flight that arrived nearly two days later than scheduled, she does have some funny stories about her travel experiences.
She got a call early one morning recently from United Airlines baggage service in Chicago, asking her if she lost a bag. She knew she didn’t lose anything, but recalled seeing an unattended bag near her when she checked in at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to come home. Sure enough, the agent had tagged the wrong bag with Hafdahl’s name and routing.
Once she arrives at a destination, it’s nearly all business, with a routine day sometimes meaning leaving the hotel at 6 a.m., and not returning until around 11 p.m. Getting a good night’s rest is important, so she doesn’t normally stay out socializing, she said.
Her increased mileage this year reflects a growing importance in promoting Hawai’i and Kaua’i to international markets other than Japan and Canada, she observed. Hafdahl handles consumer, travel trade, wholesalers, meeting planners, and other marketing efforts aimed at specific groups.
Oftentimes, Sue Kanoho, KVB executive director, or KVB staffer Shereen Ho’opi’i, will also make the promotional trips, along with activities, hotel and other partners both from Kaua’i and other places in the state.
“It’s great going out and representing the destination. I do represent the entire state,” and oftentimes the Hawai’i promotional travelers work and play as a unit. “There’s a camaraderie there,” and those touched by the Hawai’i presence at conventions, shows, shopping centers and other venues can feel it, too, she said.
“People around the world see that camaraderie. I don’t feel that we’re in competition with any other island.”
Joining kumu Jessi Jardin’s hula halau on Kaua’i has helped her personally and professionally, allowing her to feel comfortable getting on stage with other dancers and musicians when they’re all on the road together.
When Hafdahl goes, many times this year it has been to conduct Kaua’i awareness training for reservations agents at tour wholesaler houses. Her goal was to visit five this year, and already she has hit seven.
She’ll see Pacific Escapes and Gogo Tours in Seattle later this month, conducting the training for reservations agents she says the wholesalers hunger for. “They’re so happy to have us.”
One of her next trips will be for a certified meeting planner conclave, where issues common to meeting planners will be discussed, and where the professionals will write questions for their own grueling certification test, she said.
Hafdahl is able to bring her husband with her on some mainland and Hawai’i trips, and they have traveled to Germany, where her husband’s grandmother lives, several times.
Getting back to a couple of funny stories, she recalled being in a long line waiting to get into Buckingham Palace in London (the palace is open to visitors when the queen is away on holiday), and hearing an American ask if that was the line for the hot dog vendor.
Sometimes, when the Hawai’i entertainers are singing and dancing hula on stage, in a display obviously promoting the state, people will still come up and ask what language they’re singing, she said, shaking her head.
No laughing matter, though, is the KVB’s substantial travel budget ($160,000 this year for air, meals, shipping, ground transportation and lodging, and another $25,800 for meetings, conventions and incentives promotions), and a budgeted $175,000 for promoting Kaua’i to leisure travelers next year.
Business Editor Paul C. Curtis can be reached at mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 224).
