Proving that the PTSD from the pandemic is going to offer up likely several decades more of total fear porn, Maui’s mayor is pleading to airlines: “Please don’t bring so many people to our island.”
For a year, Hawaii, which derives much of its revenue from tourism, was shut down to everyone but locals. Now, it seems the once-prominent issue of “over-tourism”, often cited by locals as a complaint of living on the island, is back in full force. Except this time, when the tourists showed back up, the island is scurrying to make up a shortage of hospitality workers, U.S. News and World Report said. The islands restaurants are struggling to keep up, the report says.
Mayor Michael Victorino recently said: “We don’t have the authority to say stop, but we are asking the powers to be to help us.”
Victorino has blamed the airport: “It’s the airlift that really drives all of this. Without airlift, people don’t come.”
Hawaiian Airlines spokesman Alex Da Silva responded by saying that while the company is conscious of the regulations and requests, it is visitors that drive the state’s economy.
The island still has “some of the nation’s most stringent coronavirus public health restrictions”, according to the report. It is also the only state that hasn’t fully reopened, mostly due to its remote location and limited hospital capacity. The islanders also have on their mind “the memory of diseases that wiped out 80% of the Native Hawaiian population in the century after Europeans arrived”, U.S. News and World Report writes. – READ MORE
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