Outrigger CEO Wagoner on Hawaii outlook, plans

Note: This story first appeared on Travel Weekly

HONOLULU – Outrigger Resorts & Hotels has been steadily growing its footprint in its home state of Hawaii, adding both the Outrigger Kaanapali Beach Resort in Maui and the Outrigger Kauai Beach Resort & Spa last year. Over the past few years, the company has also established a foothold in the Asia Pacific market, where it now has seven flags planted across Fiji, Thailand, Mauritius and the Maldives.

Travel Weekly Hotels Editor Christina Jelski got the latest on the company’s performance, and the tourism outlook overall, from Outrigger Resorts & Hotels CEO Jeff Wagoner.

Travel Weekly (TW): How has Maui's tourism and hospitality sector navigated the aftermath of the wildfires?

Jeff Wagoner: All of the residents who were displaced from their homes and were in hotels and condos have been moved into some type of more permanent housing, which is fantastic. Hotels are back to traditional business, and the business is starting to increase pretty rapidly in West Maui. We’re very encouraged with occupancy at this stage, and each month it continues to get stronger. We bought the Outrigger Kaanapali Beach Resort two weeks before the wildfires, so, as you can imagine, we’re still ramping up that property; but it’s performing very similarly to the rest of the hotels in that market. We’re in the planning phases for what the future looks like for this hotel, which we’ll announce shortly.

TW: How has the broader Hawaiian market performed?

Wagoner: When you look at Oahu and the Honolulu and Waikiki markets, performance has been very strong. Our properties have outperformed the prior year significantly, which is great to see. The Kauai market and the Big Island continue to perform very well. The only area we really saw the decline in, for the most part, is Maui. There was a little bit of decline on Kauai and the Big Island right after the wildfires, but once the consumer understood it was contained in Maui, those other markets picked back up.

TW: Is Hawaii benefiting from strong group travel trends?

Wagoner:: Group typically is not a huge piece of the market in Honolulu, but the convention center there has just had their best year in its history. For us, our Kona property and Kauai property have the largest meetings space of any of our properties across the globe, and so we’re very focused on the return of group travel into those markets. We’re seeing a nice return of the tour travel, and a lot of it is coming from international. We’ve seen some groups come in from Australia, some from Canada; Japan, as well.

TW: Speaking of Japan, are you seeing demand from that market start to pick back up?

Wagoner:: This year is significantly higher than last year. We’re somewhere between 50% to 60% of 2019 numbers for travel from Japan. Currency continues to fluctuate, but it recently has been better than it was a few months ago. And I think with the currency gap lessening, that’s going to help quite a bit.

TW: What trends are you seeing across Outrigger’s Asia Pacific portfolio?

Wagoner: Fiji has performed spectacularly. Ever since Australia opened its borders to travelers from outside of Australia, those properties have performed very well, running 90%-plus occupancy every month. All three of our Thailand properties have performed very well and exceeded our expectations. China used to be the largest source market into Thailand, and that’s started to come back. In the Maldives, there’s a lot of new inventory. We’re performing well there, but it’s not quite as strong as some other areas have been. Still, properties in the Maldives are running 75% to 85% occupancy, and average rate continues to remain strong. But we’ve seen that Fiji and Thailand have been significantly stronger than we anticipated.