Hawaiian Airlines didn’t fail — The world changed around it

by Stan Fichtman, Hawaii Politics, Aug 30, 2025

A couple of weeks back, the folks at Beat of Hawaii (BOH)issued an article titled “Why Hawaiian Airlines Failed: A Story of Planes, Promises, And Pride”. In it, the two gentlemen at BOH laid out a case where the airline was either too poor or too stubborn to pivot for survival, thus leading it to be bought out by Alaska Airlines.

BOH’s argument boils down to this: Hawaiian’s leadership (at that time under CEO Peter Ingram) clung to outdated strategies — sticking with widebodies while competitors like Alaska built an efficient Hawaii network on narrow-bodies. In their telling, that stubbornness sealed Hawaiian’s fate.

In a response this blogger made to a friend, who also is a watcher of commercial aviation in Hawaii, it was noted that some of BOH’s points have merit. But their larger conclusion leans too heavily on hindsight. By flattening complex circumstances into a neat morality play, they give Hawaiian Air too little credit for trying to adapt to factors it couldn’t control — and too much blame for decisions that, at the time, made sense.

In other words, the story attempted to use a neat narrative to describe the outcome, but left out pieces that, in context, made business decisions that made sense.

Let's explain:

Before COVID slammed the industry like an 18-wheeler barreling down H1 at 90 mph, in March of 2020, the strategy of Hawaiian's fleet use and destinations was a bellwether of success. Their approach to bringing the Asian tourism market to Hawaii kept load factors steady. In their approach, the airline was able to quickly determine whether a route was a winner (most of the Japan routes) and which ones couldn't make it (Manila, Philippines, Taipei, Taiwan).

With COVID, the airline, along with everyone else in tourism, was looking for two things: the first was the reopening of tourism to Hawaii from anywhere. That happened first with the West Coast, which spiked the minute the State of Hawaii set up the COVID protocols when arriving. Economists assumed Japan would return in a few years.

What few foresaw was the yen collapsing nearly 50% against the dollar, making U.S. trips prohibitively expensive for Japanese travelers. That single factor, combined with Hawaii’s strict shutdowns, crippled the market Hawaiian depended. And that, even today, is still an issue plaguing the entire Hawaii tourism industry.

Now, provided that Hawaiian did think that its unique service model for passengers would rue the day when it came to airline choices, the fact is, forces beyond its control dictated travel behavior.

But even then, Hawaiian would still try to work its magic, if not for Japan, to other places. And Hawaiian did pivot. Routes to Orlando and Austin weren’t random gambles — they were deliberate attempts to replace lost Asian demand with new continental markets. That’s not the behavior of an airline clinging to the past. It’s the behavior of one fighting to adapt in impossible circumstances. One can easily argue that they tried all they could, once they realized it, to build new markets.

Going to the comparison that BOH made to Alaska's strategy, and holding up their model as the one Hawaiian should have followed, the comparison (and potential relative success of it) only goes so far.

Alaska is, at its core, even today, a domestic carrier. It’s Hawaii playbook — West Coast routes on narrow-body planes — fit its network, cost structure, and customer base. Hawaiian, by contrast, was (and still is in name) an international-level airline. Its goal wasn’t just to fly Angelinos to Maui. It was to connect Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, and beyond to Honolulu. Different strategies for different markets.

Yes, Hawaiian may have been late to adopt the Airbus A321neo. Yes, the interisland Boeing 717 aircraft replacement plan was muddled. But those were secondary to the macroeconomic and pandemic shocks. Suggesting, though, that Hawaiian “failed” because it didn’t become Alaska misses the fundamental point: it wasn’t trying to be Alaska.

Finally, a financing factor needs to be discussed – not in terms of revenue and expenses, but more about access to capital. As this blogger wrote last year about Hawaiian’s prospects for a new continental hub, the airline simply didn’t have a lot of cash like Alaska did before the buyout. That limited its ability to get funding from markets or use its existing funds to expand. 

The challenge Hawaiian faced was that, with it being stretched already with debt for new airplanes (A321, Boeing 787s), along with a notably smaller revenue base, any attempt at a pivot would have very little margin for error.

So the airline, seeing its actions in this context, did what it could, with what it had.

At the end, Hawaiian Airlines, as an independent airline in the United States, didn’t fail, or at least didn’t in the way BOH relays it. It was trying to address a quickly shifting market that no one could have predicted, and in the end got caught in forces that were beyond its control.

Turning Hawaiian’s story into a morality play might make for easy headlines, but it does little justice to the reality. The airline wasn’t blindsided by its own arrogance — it was sideswiped by COVID, by Hawaii’s own prolonged shutdowns, by Japan’s deep and ongoing economic struggles. To say it “failed” because it didn’t copy Alaska is to confuse hindsight with analysis.

What took Hawaiian down, instead, was a world that shifted underneath it. In that light, Hawaiian didn’t “fail.” It carried Hawaii as far as it could, until forces beyond its control became just too much.

And that, more than any headline, is the real story.

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The story about Hawaiian Airlines’ buyout by Alaska was covered by this blog from the month that the announcement came down on a Sunday in December. The series of reports was a second-place winner in the “Column Writing or Blog/Features or Sports” category in the 2024 Hawaii Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalism awards given out last July.