Here’s How County Leaders Think Maui Can Get Tourism Under Control … In a 418-page report, a group outlined a dozen ways to prevent the island from being overrun with visitors.
From capping the number of hotels to requiring tourists to make reservations for popular spots like hiking trails and waterfalls, a group of Maui County leaders tasked with finding new ways to control over-tourism has released its list of ideas.
Over the last six months, a small group of Maui County Council members — officially known as the “tourism management and economic development temporary investigative group” — spent hours meeting and interviewing business, government and community leaders to come up with new ways to rein in what many Maui residents believe is an unmanageable number of tourists.
Before the pandemic struck, Maui saw more than 3 million visitor arrivals in 2019, according to Hawai’i Tourism Authority data. Those numbers plummeted to 793,000 in 2020, but rose back up to nearly 2.3 million last year.
