At My Hawaiian Vacation Club, Some Guests Don’t Believe Covid Exists
By: Mai Tran
Tags: Work, Tourism, Travel, The Way We Work Now, World

The Way We Work Now is a series chronicling how peoples’ lives and careers have fundamentally changed because of the pandemic.

This anonymous resort worker, 27, is an activities operations supervisor at a hotel in O’ahu. She spoke with Mai Tran about how tourism has picked up in Hawaii in recent months.

Covid hit Hawaii in January and we continued working until March. My hotel is actually a vacation club, so we never closed. They had a skeletal crew the entire time our hotel was open. There were three front office people, two engineers, and three housekeepers. That was it. We definitely lost business and that’s why so many of us had to be furloughed. I stopped working on March 25 and didn’t return until October 3.

During our hotel’s regular business, we have an average of 90% occupancy throughout the entire year. When Covid came, we dropped to 2% occupancy for about four months. Then we went up to 7% and it seemed really good. When I returned in October, we were averaging 25%, and now we’re up to 70% or 80%.

A lot of the people coming are locals, transpacific travelers, or our owners who have been wanting to come stay, but didn’t want to waste their vacation days on the 14-day quarantine. On the weekends is when we see our locals the most. We have people who are really appreciative of our sanitization and all the procedures we have in place. Then, we also have others who think Covid doesn’t exist. They are very vocal about that and feel like they can do whatever they want. Others are kind of in between, and say, “It sucks you don’t have a lot of things open, but I understand. At the same time, I’m paying all this money.” We see a mixture of guests and owners who vocalize how they feel about it.

“If you’re going to come with a negative attitude and expect things to be the exact same way as before, you can go back home — you’re traveling in the middle of a pandemic.”

I have mixed feelings about mainlanders coming to the island during the pandemic, as a local and as someone who works in the tourism industry. I’m very grateful that I was able to return to work, and I wouldn’t have been able to if people didn’t visit. A big part of tourism is that I’m dependent on people visiting. I’m all for people who appreciate what we’re doing and are realistic, knowing what they’re coming into and that they’re traveling during a pandemic. But the other side of me is like, “If you’re going to come with a negative attitude and expect things to be the exact same way as before, you can go back home, because you’re traveling in the middle of a pandemic.”

We want to make everyone happy and we’re trying our absolute best to do that, but we can’t bring everything back. We have to be safe and we also don’t have a full staff. We’re shorthanded because we have on-call workers, but they have very limited availability. We were all out of work for seven months, so some went on to find other things to do. One of them went back to school to become an EMT, and another graduated from college and is working at a hospital now. There’s just so much going on, but we’re really tight-knit. We have each other and we know we can depend on everyone.

I have a passion for tourism and I love traveling myself. I can totally understand wanting to travel right now, but I personally don’t want to worry about taking a Covid test and getting on a plane, so I chose to not travel this year. I usually travel at least three times a year. I just feel like it’s not right for me at this time, although I’m appreciative of the people who do want to come. At the end of the day, I know there are a lot of people who don’t have jobs right now and I’d never take being able to work for granted.