This is the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport, previously known as Honolulu International Airport. It is a fewmiles outside Honolulu and is easily reachable by two highways. There is plenty of ground transportation there including hotel shuttles, taxis and buses. Son there will also be a train from the airport to the resort section of town called Waikiki. The Honolulu Tourism Board and the State Government are working on a plan to test travellers for Covid-19 before then leave their point of origin and refuse any who test positive. The idea is to create and maintain a Covid-19 tourist destination. They are still working out the details and legalities, plus the details of the current 14 day quarantine. Tourism is the lifeblood of the Hawaiian Islands, but the governments shut down tourism early by working with the airlines to stop most of the flights into the State from overseas and the mainland US.
The airport has beautiful art, which this month features Hawaiian flowers. The airport art seems to change themes periodically. For a while it was a World War Two them with old planes, tanks and WW2 era ship models throughout the airport. They also had several displays about airport modernization efforts.
I travel for work as an essential worker, providing services to remote locations. The airport today was pretty empty and it鈥檚 been like this for a few months. This is the airport waiting room at gate A18 this morning as I wait for my flight. It pretty empty,with staff and travelers seemingly in equal numbers. Normally this would be over half full and the closer you get to the gates the fuller they normally would be, in fact the gate waiting rooms are almost uniformly full from 10AM flights to 6PM flights with volume dropping after that. I have been traveling by plane every other week for six years for my job, so I have been in the airport a lot!
The waiting area.
I flew Hawaiian Airlines It features planes decorated with beautiful Wahine (woman in Hawaiian language)The planes are painted with pretty flowers and the side image of a woman. The seats are a cute turqoise blue. The staff are friendly and the airline is one of the few offering water and juice on the short flights and free meals on the longer flights. Definitely a plus. The seats are comfortable and spacious. I am six foot tall and for short flights I book a standard seat, but for ten dollars at check-in you can get 6 more inches of leg room by upgrading to premium. I rarely fly firts class unless I get a free upgrade, which can happen if you accumulate enough miles in a year to get platinum status.
My flight had seven passengers on 120 seat plane. As you can see from the pictures the planeis empty and I felt quite safe knowing I was six feet or more from anyone and the air was being filtered. They have staff clean the plane with a mist disinfector in between flights and they give you a hand sanitizer as you get on the plane so I wipe down my seat belt.
I wear a mask and comply with social distancing rules. I actually think it鈥檚 pretty safe to fly inter island because so few people are traveling. The prices are great too. A $200.00 flight costs only $58,00 now.
馃洬馃洬馃洬 Shortsegments
Title: Honolulu Airport: Aloha and Flowers
Tags: hawaii-polynesia hawaii tourism covid
