Airlines Airlines ADVERTISING High interisland fares stifling economy Every time I go to book an interisland flight it seems the airfare has crept up $5 to $10 over the last time. The cheapest roundtrip fare from Kona to Lihue is
Airlines
High interisland fares stifling economy
Every time I go to book an interisland flight it seems the airfare has crept up $5 to $10 over the last time.
The cheapest roundtrip fare from Kona to Lihue is now $230 plus an additional $34 for a checked bag for a total of $264. It is 546 miles roundtrip, making the cost for this route a whopping 48 cents per mile. By contrast I recently booked a roundtrip flight from Honolulu to Bangkok for $936. This is a flight of more than 13,000 miles roundtrip and includes two checked bags and meals in its fare. This is equivalent to about 9.5 cents a mile, less that 20 percent of what we are paying per mile for interisland fares. Shoot, you can fly to the West Coast for less than twice the interisland price and it is a 5,000-mile roundtrip journey. Ten times the distance for twice the price.
Even if you argue that the interisland flights are short hops and cost more per mile, then why can Air Asia charge only 13.5 and 16 cents per mile for two one-hour flights I recently bought (including one checked bag) and only 9 cents per mile for a two-hour flight? If you applied a 15 cents per mile rate to the Kona to Lihue fare, it would be about $82 roundtrip — not $264, including a checked bag each way.
These high fares will only serve to stifle tourism. What family of four will pay $1,000 to fly roundtrip from Kona to Lihue and back? Instead, they will stay on Oahu and not travel interisland. This also increases the cost of commerce since all of us will pay the increased prices of goods and services for personnel to travel interisland as a course of business. Forget about leisure travel for locals to visit family and friends on other islands. It is simply unaffordable.
I urge our governor and Legislature to investigate the predatory pricing of interisland airlines before it further damages our state economy.
Richard Fucik
Kalaoa
Social Security
Closing office is
unfair to west side
The closing of the Social Security Administration’s Kona office is a very sorry situation. There’s at least as many people in West Hawaii as East Hawaii. If money is an issue, why not just split the staff in half and have both offices?
This decision is just not fair to those of us on the west side of the island.
C.F. Steffen
Captain Cook
