Considering Traveling To Hawaii? | Get The Facts Before You Go!

6/16/2021 10:00:17 AM Link 0 comments | Add comment

Interest in visiting the islands is running high, but the price of paradise can be multiple Covid tests, expensive stints in quarantine, long waits in line and more.

Currently, to visit the islands or move between them, travelers, regardless of whether they have been vaccinated or not, have to show a negative Covid test result taken within 72 hours of traveling. These tests range in price, with some people paying $200 or $300.

Vaccinated travelers complain that the tests are expensive and unnecessary and that getting the correct information about what is required is too difficult.

“Today’s Hawaii travel is much tougher than you might think,” said Cheryl Temple, a former mayor of the town of Orting in Washington who is currently in Kauai. “Read every word when researching and click on every link. It’s all there, but I missed a small but significant piece.”

Ms. Temple’s son lives on the island of Kauai, but recently had surgery on Oahu. She flew there to meet him and then flew to Kauai with him, where she planned to spend time caring for him at his home. She is fully vaccinated and before traveling from the mainland to Oahu had gotten a negative Covid test. But when she landed in Kauai, she was told she either had to fly back to Oahu and get tested or immediately go into quarantine on Kauai for 10 days, in a hotel apart from her son. She flew back to Oahu, got tested for $150 and then flew back to Kauai.

Other travelers relate similarly frustrating experiences when traveling between islands. They said that the rules for testing to get to Hawaii from the mainland are clear and well-explained on the Safe Travel site, but rules about inter-island travel are vaguer and harder to understand. The state’s Tourism Authority said that Hawaii’s rental car fleet decreased by more than 40 percent during the pandemic because many car companies sold off their cars. One client, who recently traveled to Maui, said she got quoted a price of $3,000 to rent a car for 12 days.

The cost of ride shares with services including Uber and Lyft is also extremely high. The Tourism Authority is urging travelers to use other modes of transportation to navigate the islands.

At every turn, travelers said that they were required to show the QR code they received when they uploaded their test results before getting on a flight — when renting a car, checking into a hotel, at some restaurants and when participating in various excursions. Some found the process tedious and unnecessarily strict. A simpler solution, many people said, would be to make it possible to show that you’ve been vaccinated once — upon arrival at the airport. And those traveling between islands said one test should suffice. The assumption should be that if you are in Hawaii, you have been through the rigorous screening process to get there. Authorities, however, said the state instituted the rigorous testing rules in an effort to protect locals.

But some travelers, said that they understand the abundance of precautions that the state is taking. Others said that they specifically chose to go to Hawaii because they knew that coronavirus has been taken seriously there and they would be safe. Jumping through the hoops, they say, is a small price to pay for paradise.

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