Hawaiian Airlines Is Taking Off As Travel Restrictions Ease 1 After bleeding more than $4 million per day during the pandemic, the state’s dominant air carrier and linchpin of the tourism industry forecast a positive cash flow by summer.
Hawaiian Airlines, the state’s dominant air carrier and one of its largest private employers, is rebounding amid increasing visitors from the mainland, executives said Tuesday during an earnings call with Wall Street analysts.
But there’s still a big piece missing — Japanese travelers.
The good news: even without much travel from Japan, Hawaiian executives said the company’s losses are shrinking and the carrier could have positive cash flow by summer.
It’s a remarkable turnaround from the spring of 2020, when travel to Hawaii was largely shut down by orders requiring all arriving passengers to quarantine for two weeks because of the coronavirus pandemic. In April 2020, Hawaiian’s president and chief executive, Peter Ingram, said the company was losing $4 million to $4.5 million a day.
