Even in early 2008, the visitor industry was expecting a slowdown from the record business of 2007. But nobody expected the screeching halt that began in late March when first Aloha Airlines and then ATA folded.
Besides hundreds of jobs lost directly, the reduction in airline seats made it harder for tourists to get to Maui. Worse was to come, as an economic crunch spurred by the financial disaster of bad mortgage loans spread into a massive global business downturn.
By September, there were plenty of seats on airliners available to Hawaii, and State Tourism Liaison Marsha Wienert warned that if airlines couldn't fill planes, they would cancel flights, which might never be replaced.
Seats, however, continued to shuttle across the ocean empty, and by October the head count on Maui was down by one-fifth.
The contraction of tourism was being felt around the world, but among Hawaii destinations, Maui was affected more severely than the other counties, as our high-end resort properties tried to maintain their industry-leading rates.
Hotel occupancies were under 62 percent in October, as low as they had been right after September 2001, and fell below 50 percent in November. Maui's visitor business had rebounded within months of the September 11 attacks, but economists were not predicting anything like that, at least for the short term.
Rather, they predicted a continuing, even deepening, decline at least through the first quarter of 2009.
The global economic troubles hammered Maui in many ways. Maui Land & Pineapple Co. and its partners lost financing for the Residences at Kapalua project, and foreclosures began to spike in both resort and long-term residential areas of all three islands of Maui Nui.
While some businesses struggled to avoid layoffs, others cut back, and Maui's unemployment rate, among the lowest in the country last year, started climbing toward the national average.
