Weekly Viz 2022-01-31

COVID’s Impact on Hawaii Tourism

I have been working from Hawaii this month, and it has been amazing – get up at 7:30, log off at 3 to 4, then it’s all your free time to go hiking / sleeping on the beaches / snorkeling / … Sadly I am leaving Hawaii this week, so decided to make a Hawaii-related viz this week. The first thing came to my mind was actually the wild chicken population in Hawaii (lol) as there are just sooo many chickens running freely in Hawaii. But unfortunatelly, I am not able to locate such a dataset. Therefore, instead I found Hawaii Visitor Characteristics dataset and trying to plot the direct impact COVID has on Hawaii tourism.

My Visualization

I looked at two metrics mainly – # of visitors and % of first-time visitors, to the Oahu island specifically. I chose a bar + line combined chart to make it easier to see the trend and compare.

Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

Dashboard link

Insights

• At the beginning of COVID spread in the US (~ March 2020), we see sharp decline in the visitors number to Oahu, likely due to various travel restrictions around the world and the stay-at-home order in Hawaii;
• The tourists number recovered slowly since then, and reached a peak since the pandemic in July 2021 – the visitors number is close to slack seasons pre-pandemic, but July supposed to be the busiest month in Oahu around the year;
• Interestingly, we see a similar trend of the % first-time visitors as it also dumped at the beginning of the pandemic and gradually bouncing back, indicating the travelers during the pandemic skewed more towards people who have already been to Hawaii – this makes sense as international visitors are less likely to come to Hawaii due to all kinds of government regulations (and we, the people on the west coast, have nowhere to go but all go to Hawaii over and over again…).

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