LIHU‘E — For hundreds of years, visitors came to the Hawaiian Islands on double-hulled wa‘a, more commonly known today as outrigger canoes. Attendees at the Kaua‘i Visitors Bureau year-end luncheon, held at the Kaua‘i Beach Resort, followed a similar stream
LIHU‘E — For hundreds of years, visitors came to the Hawaiian Islands on double-hulled wa‘a, more commonly known today as outrigger canoes.
Attendees at the Kaua‘i Visitors Bureau year-end luncheon, held at the Kaua‘i Beach Resort, followed a similar stream of thought Thursday.
With Dennis Chun, an instructor of Hawaiian Studies at Kaua‘i Community College, at the helm as keynote speaker for the event, other speakers addressed what was happening in their respective “canoes” in their work to bring visitors to the Garden Isle.
“All of you have your own canoe to paddle,” Mayor Bernard Carvalho Jr. said of everyone in Hawai‘i having their own special role in making the overall journey successful, from dealing with issues such as safety to economic development to making sure we “take care of our family.”
Kathy Pahinui of Laird Christianson Advertising in Honolulu spoke to the power of movies, as she said 22 percent of all first-time visitors to Kaua‘i said they came because of a movie they saw, such as “The Descendants,” “Soul Surfer,” “Jurassic Park,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” or “South Pacific.”
She also addressed the impact of social media on steering visitors to Kaua‘i, noting that there were 7,000 new followers to KVB’s Facebook site this year, representing a 150 percent increase over 2011.
“If you put a picture up, people gravitate to it,” Pahinui said of the substantial increase of people using the Twitter stream and using the hashtag #Kauai to identify photos of their journeys to the island.
Journeys often include families traveling to the island.
Patrick Dugan of McNeil Wilson Communications noted that the public relations firm won a Koa Anvil Award for its work with Sue Kanoho’s team at the KVB on the Kanani, 2011 Girl of the Year campaign for the American Girl doll line.
Dugan said his team will be working with travel journalists to showcase the natural beauty of the island in three ways this coming year, including promoting it as a family destination, as a rejuvenating place to retreat and as a place to spark romance.
For Chun, his journey with the tourism industry started off perhaps a little less than illustrious. When he started in tourism, Chun said, making a living was “more like Rap Reutlinger’s puka shell tour guide, but it was a way to make a living.”
Over the years, he moved in to academics and began to understand tourism more from the standpoint of economics.
“With the rise of Hawaiian culture and history and the revival of language, it took on a different vision of what the industry could be like,” Chun said.
At KCC, Chun has developed a two-year associate in arts degree in Hawaiian Studies that is transferable to the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa The program is currently in its first full semester.
“The goal is for students who come out of this program to have a solid base of who they are and where they come from,” Chun said, which will then allow students to move into any program they want to, from literature to sciences and math or “whatever path they chose to take.”
Chun said prior to offering the AA degree, KCC was the first campus in the UH system to offer a certificate in Hawaiian Studies.
Because of this, Chun challenged the audience to consider how a graduate with a degree in Hawaiian Studies could benefit their businesses.
He emphasized that this course of study is not designed to be exclusive to the tourism industry.
“We want to be as academic as any program, yeah,” Chun said, asking what businesses might offer someone who understands “who the island was” and who “knows that we are the island.”
In his travels with the KVB team, Chun said he found people saying it was easier, cheaper or required less time to go to the Caribbean or the Bahamas for beaches.
“But yet,” Chun said, “what would draw them was understanding ‘who’ Kauai is, yeah.” He said making those personal connections is important for his students.
Chun addressed Carvalho’s comments on paddling and told the audience about his adventures with a group of folks over the past 15 years with building a double-hulled voyaging canoe called the Namahoe.
He said his crew hopes to have the Namahoe launched around the time Hokule‘a leaves in 2015 to travel around the world. He feels there is a great potential for collaboration between the two crews.
“There’s a lot of educational and cultural opportunities O‘ahu has because of the Hokule‘a being based there,” Chun said.
• Laurie Cicotello, business writer, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 257) or business@thegardenisland.com
