Hawaii's Tourism Agency Finished 4 of 200 'Hotspot' Fixes It Funded

Hawaii's State Auditor⧉ -- an office the state constitution makes independent of the governor specifically so it can audit executive agencies without interference -- found the Hawai'i Tourism Authority (HTA), the state agency that markets Hawaii to visitors and is supposed to manage tourism's strain on residents, spent $75,114,154 on 'destination management' between fiscal 2019 and 2024.▸ That is the category HTA's own 2020 strategic plan made its central focus, after years of residents souring on tourism. The audit found the money never represented a substantive increase, and HTA still cannot say whether any of it worked, because the agency lacks the policies, milestones, or tracking to measure its own progress⧉.

Inside that six-year total sits a more specific effort: between December 2020 and July 2021, HTA's board approved six island-level 'Destination Management Action Plans,' or DMAPs -- three-year plans covering O'ahu, Hawai'i Island, Kaua'i, Maui, Moloka'i, and Lāna'i, built around 'hotspots,' defined in each plan as sites where visitor crowding degrades the experience for both tourists and residents.▸ HTA reported spending $19,703,235 standing up the DMAP contracts themselves⧉ -- about 26% of the full six-year destination-management total, concentrated in three of those years. The plans laid out 52 overarching actions broken into 200 specific sub-actions⧉.

The auditor checked how many of those 200 sub-actions actually targeted a hotspot -- a visitor/resident friction point, the entire premise of the plans -- and found just 26, or 13%, did⧉.▸ Of those 26, only 4 -- 2% of all 200 -- were marked complete in HTA's own tracker by the time the three-year plans ran out⧉. On O'ahu, one action called for identifying and stewarding key hotspots; of its seven sub-actions, one was completed, two were in progress, and four had never been started⧉ -- and the auditor noted that the one 'completed' item was credited for holding meetings, without HTA ever naming which sites the meetings identified.

The audit's second finding explains why so little of the money produced hotspot fixes: HTA 'expedited' the DMAP process and delegated the decisions that mattered -- who sat on each island's steering committee, which actions got funded, how progress would be tracked -- to outside contractors and the committees themselves, without a documented framework for any of it.▸ HTA stopped publishing DMAP progress reports in mid-2022, two years before the plans were due to finish⧉, and its remaining tracking 'involved little more than filling out a to-do list' before the Authority stopped tracking altogether. In one O'ahu example, HTA credited progress on a stewardship sub-action partly by pointing to more than $1 million in unrelated community-grant funds⧉ -- when the auditor asked which hotspot projects that money funded, HTA said the grants weren't required to address hotspots at all.

This is not a new pattern for HTA.▸ Hawaii's State Auditor has now examined HTA's contracts, management, or major agreements six times since 2002⧉ -- report after report finding weak contract oversight, missing written policies, and inadequate monitoring. A 2003 audit, for comparison, found a separate HTA marketing predecessor had spent $151.7 million with 'no identifiable benefit to the State' -- a much older figure from a different report, not part of the current $75.1 million total, but evidence the pattern predates the current DMAP program by two decades. This time, HTA's written response did not dispute a single finding, conclusion, or statement in the audit⧉; the Auditor's office, in turn, wrote that the DMAP process was 'rushed, delegated almost entirely to consultants without meaningful HTA oversight.'

The Auditor's recommendations set the baseline HTA has now agreed to meet: future strategic plans need measurable targets with specific starting points, and HTA must report its own progress against them annually -- the tracking discipline the current DMAPs never had.▸ HTA told the Auditor the fixes are already underway through organizational restructuring and 'enhanced performance tracking,' but no recommendation carries a statutory deadline⧉; the Auditor's office says only that it will independently check HTA's progress in two to three years.