I know I generally write about Internet business with a Hawaii theme, but I’ve been wanting to move to Diamond Head, and I came across this fabulous beach home that I wish I could afford!

America’s Coolest Beach Homes

Of course I thought this one was the best because it’s in a place I actually want to live.

• Selling Services - Property management marketed through their Kauai vacation rental website.

The site itself is easy to navigate and there is great information about the properties including detailed descriptions and very nice photos. The problem with the site is its booking system which was not only slow and clunky, but a bit confusing to use. It was manageable, however, by improving this system they could up their conversion rate and therefore bookings. I’m guessing their current booking engine creates a lot of phone orders as well. So an improvement with this part of the site would reduce staff costs also.

The one thing that makes this site successful are the photos, floor plans and virtual tours. The photos are amazing and make me want to stay in their properties. If you don’t believe me, check out these pictures of their Donohugh home! The floor plans are a nice touch and something that most other vacation rentals sites don’t offer.

In order to improve on this onine business, I think that TPC needs to expand beyond Poipu Resort. The cost of the website, SEO and staff needed to fulfill customer services isn’t being leveraged to its full potential. By offering vacation rentals in other areas of Kauai, TPC could increase their take without increasing their overhead. This would lead to greater profitability and a brighter future for the company.

Likes:
Photos make me want to take a vacation. Floor plans are a nice touch.

Dislikes:
Booking system should be upgraded.

Conclusion:
The Parrish Collection has a nicely done site, but it’s the content that really stands out. Improving the bookings system and leveraging what they have by breaking out of the Poipu market will help them reach their full potential.

• Selling Services - Direct sales bypass booking agencies.

The site is done very nicely and there’s a lot of information to help make a buying decision including video, photos, description and customer reviews and rating from TripAdvisor displayed directly on the site. I really like this last feature because it gives you the opportunity to see unbiased remarks about what others have experienced. From the reviews you can tell Safari Helicopters is a reputable company selling a good Kauai helicopter and Big Island helicopter tours.

The one place the site fell short was in the booking system. Not that it was bad, but it could definitely be improved which would lead to higher conversion and more sales.

Likes:
The site design and information on the site is great. I also really like the TripAdvisor ratings displayed directly on the site.

Dislikes:
Booking system could be simplified. What about more ratings from other websites like Yelp?

Conclusion:
Overall this looks like a profitable business model. I’m sure the online bookings are worth more to Safari Helicopters then other sources, like activity desks, so improving their SEO would be beneficial and only bring more money into the business.

1. Cost Per Click (CPC) - They use Google Adsense for their contextual advertising. It also looks like they have some internal CPC going when they link out to other websites.
2. Affiliate Model - They use multiple affiliate programs for at least hotels.

Uptakes use of information from multiple sources makes it a winner in my book. You can also see that with a lot of traffic, their CPC and Affiliate models could be very lucrative. After surpassing 1 million monthly visitors in less then a year after their launch in May 2008, they’re well on their way to becoming a profitable company.

Likes:
You already I know I like their data aggregation. Having information from multiple sources makes a site very useful and this is definitely going to pull in the traffic. And once you have a lot of website traffic, making money becomes a whole lot easier.

Dislikes:
It appears they have the ability to include an affiliate model in their Hawaii activities section, however they’re not taking advantage of this yet. I think Uptake understands this and I’m sure we’ll see them monetizing this part of their website in the future.

Conclusion:
Overall this is a great site and the reviews make it useful for planning a Hawaii vacation. If you take a look at Uptake over SEMrush, you’ll see their Google traffic is worth $2.3 M / month alone. If they can figure out how to monetize this to the fullest, they have a very sustainable vacation website.

1. Cost Per Click (CPC) - They use Google Adsense for their contextual advertising.
2. Affiliate Model - They use multiple affiliate programs to provide accommodations, car rentals, travel insurance, vacation packages, cruises and activities.

Overall, the site has a nice theme and is easy to navigate. I appreciate the simple straight forward navigation and everything is just one click away. The buttons to “book” and “learn more” are also easy to see which leads to high conversion ratios.

Likes:
Besides easy navigation, I like that Hawaii Destinations has tried to incorporate many different things that Hawaii visitors might want for their vacations. They have an informative golf and wedding sections which is great content for visitors. Travel insurance is something that I don’t see offered by a lot of Hawaii vacation sites, and this is thoughtful.

Dislikes:
In order to become more popular, I think Hawaii Destinations needs to continue on its goal of providing “quality information”. While the golf and wedding sections are great, they are certainly not everything somebody visiting Hawaii is looking for. More information on beaches, sightseeing, activities, etc would really go along way in improving their traffic.

Conclusion:
Hawaii Destinations has made a great start in the competitive Hawaii travel website market. With their multiple monetization models (that could be successful with more traffic) and low overhead, this could be a sustainable business model if they continue to develop more useful content.

1. Cost Per Click (CPC) - They use Google Adsense for their contextual advertising.
2. Affiliate Advertising - They have affiliate agreements with several rental car agencies.
3. Selling Services - The owner actually books his own rentals on this site, so they offer a vacation rental agency service.
4. Direct Ad Sales - They also post advertisement to owner direct vacation properties.

Summit Pacific has done a great job developing useful content around a Kauai vacation theme. They have info for their guest including activities, golf and even real estate for visitors interested in buying a vacation home of their own. At this point, much of this content is monetized using CPC. What really impresses me, though, is how they’ve been able to take their Hawaii car rentals section beyond CPC into an affiliate program.

Likes:
I really like how Summit Pacific is trying all forms of monetization on their site. Also, the content developed around their Kauai vacation rental theme is very strong. This surely helps them in the search engines.

Dislikes:
The site appears to offer vacation rental pages for the other Hawaiian islands. However, the same care for content development has not been taken to support these pages. I also see that that the company has a separate site for Kuhio Shores (resort in Poipu Kauai), and two sites are never as strong as one.

Conclusion:
The current business model appears to be effective. However, I would like to see monetization taken a step further. Just like car rentals, activities could be moved away from CPC to an affiliate program. Also, content development for the other islands should be improved if they plan to tackle these markets.

• Sells Services - The company is paid a commission by property owners for providing a booking service for their rentals.

There are two things that really set Hawaiian Beach Rentals apart from other vacation rental booking companies:

1. Their commitment to Internet marketing gives them a huge advantage in traffic and allows them to fill rentals where other businesses struggle.
2. They aggregate vacation properties from multiple agencies which allows them to offer a larger selection of accommodations to their site visitors. The company manages about 400 Oahu vacation rentals of their own, but by working with other property management companies, they are able to offer 10 times the vacation homes and condos then they would normally.

Likes:
Hawaiian Beach Rentals stands out because they reach beyond their own Oahu properties to aggregate accommodations on their site from around the state. By doing this, they effectively increase their income potential allowing them to have a larger marketing budget. This, in turn, delivers more traffic to their website allowing them to fill their own and other agencies rentals.

Dislikes:
The one thing lacking in Hawaiian Beach Rental’s business model is that they are not taking full advantage of their Internet traffic. I would like to see another source of income, perhaps an affiliate program to sell activities near the rentals they book. This would increase revenue without increasing costs. So effectively this would be pure profit.

Conclusion:
As a whole, this is an effective business model which I feel is sustainable for a long time to come.

1. Affiliate program - Hawaii.com receives a percentage of the sale whenever they send a user to another website and that user buys something.
2. Cost Per Click (CPC) - advertising where vendors pay every time a user clicks on their ad (a.k.a. pay-per-click).

For their affiliate program, Hawaii.com co-brands with Expedia.com and also uses Pleasant Holidays. This is pretty straight forward on the website. You can search for vacation packages, airfare, hotels and rentals right from the home page or choose package deals from internal island pages.

The CPC’s are setup as ads around content and whenever a client clicks on one of these ads, Hawaii.com receives a agreed upon payment.

Likes:
The positive thing Hawaii.com has going for it is that they have multiple sources of income. By taking advantage of more then one business model, they can cross sell and earn more income then they would otherwise.

Dislikes:
I have worked with Hawaii.com on their CPC model and on several occasions they have overcharged me for clicks. After showing them that my server stats were showing about half of the referral traffic they were showing, I was given a refund. But this has become a monthly reoccurring issue that has become quite irritating. Overcharging clients is not the way to earn repeat business and I am on the fence as to whether I should renew with them.

Another issue I see with Hawaii.com is their lack of content. The CPC model works best when its driven by lots of interesting content. Hawaii.com’s site has little content and is littered with advertisement. From an end users perspective, there’s not much use for the website unless you’re looking to buy something. This wouldn’t be a problem accept that the keywords bringing traffic to the site are broad “Hawaii vacation” terms. Additional content useful for planning a Hawaii vacation would go a long way in capturing their visitors attention which would lead to more clicks on their advertisements.

Conclusion:
With the high overhead of a corporate Gannett Company, this does not appear to be a sustainable Hawaii tourism business model. But with some slight changes to site architecture and the addition of content, Hawaii.com wouldn’t need to overcharge their clients for clicks to cover the cost of running the site.

The overall purpose of this component is to assure public awareness of, and input to, the overall project … to consider the social and cultural effects of Hawai`i tourism (past, present, and especially future) … and to see if the ideas generated during the project are supported by the overall public in meetings and a survey of residents on all islands. The consultant for this component is also responsible for “overall project coordination,” but just in the sense of preparing a final report summarizing all three components, in a consistent format.

The Infrastructure and Economic/Environmental components are intended to produce some hard facts and figures. They are the “bones” of the Sustainable Tourism project. The Socio-Cultural and Public Input component puts some “flesh” on those bones by analyzing some of the human issues and by gathering resident input. Some parts of this study include facts and figures, but other parts have to do with beliefs and values.

Critical activities include:

1. Developing a public information and input effort, including this website, to deal with all three components of the Sustainable Tourism project.

2. Holding public meetings on all islands.

3. Assembling a Study Group of “stakeholders” from different interest groups – various parts of the tourism industry, environmentalists, Native Hawaiians, etc. – who are meeting throughout the life of the project. They are working on a statement of “Sustainable Tourism Goals and Indicators” which can represent agreement among many groups about how to maintain a good balance of economic, environmental, and social outcomes as tourism changes.

4. Preparing a two-part Socio-Cultural Report investigating evidence about the likely effects of tourism growth and/or change on social factors known to be of particular concern to residents – e.g., crime, housing cost, Native Hawaiian issues, etc.

The first part deals with impacts on Native Hawaiians and was written by a Native Hawaiian advisory group. The second part deals with tourism’s socio-cultural impacts on Hawai`i’s general population.

5. Compiling ideas and recommendations from all the above activities, and then conducting a survey of residents of all counties.

6. Preparing a final report, covering all three components, including recommendations for action by public and private organizations, along with ideas for future studies or public activities that could not be done during this initial Sustainable Tourism effort.

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The purpose of the Overview study was to compile an inventory of selected public and private infrastructure, as well as environmental features, in order to establish baseline data for 2000. This component was intended to identify infrastructure/environmental capacity, usage, problems and future plans, compare visitor and resident impacts and define major assumptions throughout the State. This study provides a basic understanding of the conditions and issues related to the infrastructure and environment around the state.  The study addresses the following areas:

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