I’ve been told that Waikiki is an overdeveloped overcrowded tourist trap. I’m going to be visiting there, and this description isn’t too far off. However, I’m grateful for its existence.
Here’s the thing – despite being only a couple of square miles in size, it contains almost 40% of the hotel rooms across all of Hawaii, including Kauai, Maui, the Big Island, and the rest of Oahu. This means that it’s absorbing a huge portion of Hawaii’s tourists, and tightly containing all of the attendant side effects, such as pollution, reef damage, demand for Cheesecake Factory restaurants etc.
Waikiki creates a pre-packaged version of Hawaii, with urban amenities, shopping malls, and familiar brands abutting a safe and well-supervised beach. If people are happy going to Waikiki for this experience, perhaps I shouldn’t push them too hard to expand their horizons.
If all those tourists were to spread out evenly across the rest of Hawaii, it would likely overburden the infrastructure and cause a lot of fragile natural sites to have to close or become more access-restricted. Maui and Kauai have the feel of a small-town tropical paradise, and I’m perfectly happy if Waikiki helps it stay that way.
In a strange way this mirrors the development debates happening in San Francisco. By preventing high-density development, SF has caused a lot of high-end medium-density development to displace more affordable medium density development. If SF were more willing to allow very tall buildings in a few areas, it could allow a lot more people to live in SF without disturbing the character of existing neighborhoods as much. The new high-density areas also don’t have to be nearly as touristy as Waikiki. :-)
And for what it’s worth, Waikiki does have some redeeming features. You can get excellent sushi as well as ramen, matcha, and poke.