 This is Community Matters. Today I'm going to talk about how tourism is doing after the Maui fires. It's a big question. And it wasn't going to take to come back, not only in Maui, but around the state. And for this discussion, we have Professor Jerry Urusa. Now he's a professor at the Travel Industry Management School, which is part of the Chicago College of Business. Welcome to the show, Jerry. Aloha, Jay. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. We have to touch base from time to time because we have to follow hospitality, which is the engine of our state's economy. That said, right now it seems to me there's so much cacophony and confusion about what is going on in tourism in Maui and potentially elsewhere. It seems like there are so many voices. But actually, I wish I could say I know what's getting done, but I don't think much is getting done. So whatever this is in Maui, there's no question that it has a statewide effect. And so my question to you is, what happened in Maui? How does this affect you and me and our state economy and our state hospitality industry? And how much should we here in Oahu care about that? Well, again, it was a tragedy for the fires in Maui, especially for Lahaina. The effects of the fire felt not just in Maui, but across the state. And what happened was, after the fire, they had no communication. All the electricity went down on the island, so we had minimal people with any type of communication and then social media took off. And you had people saying things that on West Maui, people are burned out of their houses and then tourists are still golfing on the golf course. This is completely untrue, completely untrue. And because of that, because of lack of communication and any information getting out, except for people that had cell phones or somehow posting things, there's been an effect, especially through social media, that people said, don't come to Maui. Don't come to Maui. And a lot of folks don't know that we're islands. I get, at times, a volcano will go up on the big island and I'll get an email from somebody and say, are you safe? Yeah, I'm safe. I'm on another island. The volcano's not gonna come to Oahu. And because we're one of the only states that are surrounded by water and that we are separate islands, people don't realize that. So when we had folks on social media saying, especially some influencers saying, don't come to visit Maui. Don't come to visit Hawaii. We don't need you now. We're going through a tragedy. People think that that's still going on. So I met some people here in Oahu. We were at dinner at Tikisa, one of the great places to look over the water. We're eating dinner and these folks were visiting. They were staying in Waikiki and they said, every year we go for two weeks to Maui, but we didn't want to go this year because of the fires. And I thought, oh, this was a week and a half ago. I was like, well, the people of Maui that the businesses are still open that haven't been closed because of the fire still need that economy. They need that economic engine. They need the tourists coming because that's the economics that runs the island of Maui. And yes, has there been people displaced? Yes. Have people now had to, is there a shortage of housing? Of course. This is without question, but there are parts of the island that are hurting because of people thinking that the whole island is shut down. It's like what happened when we had Eniki happen? I remember I traveled to the mainland about nine months later and people said, oh, isn't the whole state still shut down? And I was like, no, that was only one part of an island that got hit. The rest of us are still up and running. And I think that the challenge is so many people get so much of their information on social media that when an influencer, somebody who is from Hawaii and says that we're all shut or don't come, then people take that to heart. And we've had people not going to Maui. And you can see the occupancies of the hotels that are not catering to not having the local residents are trying to cater back to the tourists. Our occupancies are much lower. And that then has those hotels on Maui having useless staff. Now, is there a labor crisis? Yes, there's a labor crisis throughout the state. But there are people that hours are not as high, especially during the high season now with whale, this is the height of the whale season, whale watching, right? The February was the cream that month that some of those hotels were running occupancy at 60% when they used to be running 90% in February of 2022 to 2021. And with that, they needed less employees, less OT. And this is effective. And we have people not coming to our island, too, you're coming to an aloo because they think that it's disrespectful. And I understand when the fire first happened that people shouldn't have gone to Maui and that was in October, November, December. And we all have to grieve in our own way and it takes people some longer than others. But this is what runs the state. Tourism runs the state. It's the, like you said, it's the economic engine that runs the state. Well, just wondering how, which from what you say, it sounds like this came on the heels of COVID. We suffered in COVID. People didn't want to travel so much in COVID. We're afraid of getting on a plane, afraid of being in a crowded facility somewhere. And then, and then this. And so if I look at a chart theory of occupancy, I imagine occupancy went way down in Maui, but maybe it's gone down around the state. Can you just give me a, a handled, you know, just in broad terms on how occupancy has been doing? Well, you know, for the, once COVID ended, right? Well, not ended. Once we found a, a testing that worked, you know, when we were able to reopen back in, I guess, 21 of when the, when the governor allowed us, if you took a COVID test, you didn't have to quarantine for 14 days. That was a, that October, November of 2021. We, we were, you know, tourism started to come back. And then we had this thing called, like revenge tourism, right? Because 2022 people hadn't traveled for two years. So they had all this pent up demand. And that's when occupancy went way, way up, way into the nineties. And we just didn't have the employees lines everywhere. And we then were able to, you know, tourism came back with a vengeance here. And then in 20, you know, the shortage again with the lack of employees. And you can see that after that 2023, we had a, we were on a record here. We were going to have for the year, hotel tax would have hit a billion dollars. In 2019, we had 10.64 million tourists, 10.4 million. We had $600 million in hotel tax. So we were on track in 2023, they hit a billion dollars. And you know, that's the tax that tourists pay when they stay in hotels. Do we pay that tax? Yes, we do too. But as come on, we usually get a lower rate. So the tax will be lower. And most of us don't stay in hotels on the island that we live, right? We live here in O'ahu, most of us don't stay. We do take some state vacations, but as a whole, the majority of the money that comes in the hotel tax is directly related to tourism. Now, what happened is we had a shift in which type of tourist came in 2022 and 2023. The majority of the tourists came from US mainland, where before, you know, in 2019, 1.6 million tourists were just alone from Japan. That's a lot of folks. And the Japanese were our highest vendor, right? $250, $248 a day. So that segment was shut down, right? They didn't, the Japanese government didn't let anybody out of the country until 2022. And then those that did leave the country had to come back in quarantine for 10 days. So it made it very, very difficult for them to travel here due to the restrictions of the Japanese government. And then you put on top of that, you have what happened now with the American dollar is so strong versus the yen. The yen's $148 today. It's $149, $150. Where before, the yen was at $120. Or sometimes even in 108, 109. So you have this double whammy for the Japanese. They made it difficult for them to leave the country with their restrictions on coming back due to COVID. And then number two, you have the power of the US dollars. Here in Hawaii, I meet a lot of people now, local residents, they're calling it Japan. My niece just went, spent 10 days there and she says she's going back in the summer. And part of that is that our dollar is so strong it goes so much further. And this is bringing tourism that way instead of tourism coming this way. Now, they're a huge market for us. They're our largest international market. And the other international markets that were coming were also restricted due to the COVID, right? The Chinese market, Taiwanese market, they were all held back, held back due to their own government. So we had this new flood of tourists, US mainland, Canadian, but mostly US mainland, East Coast, West Coast. And as that happened, we had a change in tourists. The good thing is that we have less tourists but they're spending more money. And that's what we want. So the US tourist from 2019 West Coast was about $180 a day. And now the US West Coast tourist is spending about $250 a day. So we have a higher spending tourists coming here. And that's what we, you know, like when we last time we spoke in 2019 when there was this term called over tourism in Hawaii, you had folks that were saying this is too many tourists. And you know, you could have too many tourists at a small place or even a large place, right? I know even London at one time felt that there was over tourism coming into the city. And that was due to, there was not enough management on where you put the tourists. And if you have a good management, the amount of over tourism can be spread out. Like Disney, Disney has a whole team of folks in Disneyland and Disney World that their job is to, you know, move the people throughout the park so you don't have everybody in one place. And we've done okay job with that here on Oahu. We started with the Hanama Bay with making a reservation. I remember in the 90s, they would put people would come with big buses and just drop people off. And sometimes it was six, seven, 8,000 people sitting on that beach and that little thing. And then now we have restrictions. You have to make a reservation. You have to watch an environmental video. These are good things that have happened. Same with Diamondhead. You have to have a reservation to go there and so on. I saw there's some bills that have been trying to be proposed that they're gonna make reservations for public beaches, keep so many parking spots for residents. I think that's good. I think that's good. And we need to do more of that. That's part of what management is, right? There's a difference between marketing and managing. And I think we are already a very good at marketing. We need to learn how to do a better job at managing the tourists. And if we do a good job with that, hopefully we'll have less resident pushback because we've had the residents are not as happy as they were 10 years ago with tourism. No, I think people in general are not as happy as they were 10 years ago for a variety of reasons. But from what you've said, it sounds like, well, first of all, if tourism, if hospitality is the engine of our economy, then hotels and the like are the engine of tourism. And I really wonder how they are doing. I mean, we read about all these troubles in Maui about the hotels and they have homeless people there made homeless by the fire. And you wonder if they're getting enough money to pay their expenses, whether they're losing their staff, which is really a big resource for hotels. And whether they can stay in business this way until they get back to normal operation. So are they getting back to normal operation? Are they making money? Are they holding on to their staff? Are they healthy? And I suppose they're really asking about hotels around the state. Well, okay. In the state as a whole, there's always, there seems to be most hotels are looking for a good staff. They're looking right now, right? Like I said earlier, there's a labor crisis. It's not a labor shortage anymore. It's a crisis. Now, one of the biggest challenge these days is it isn't just the amount of workers. It's what workers have who have left. And part of that reason is, is because you can go down to basics. The basic Maslow's theory is the shelter, right? So when you had this fire in Maui, displaced all these people's shelter. So they lost something that was normal, right? People have a place to sleep. And the houseless is the term they use these days. So being houseless, it causes a lot of anxiety and why go and work if I can't have a place to sleep? And because of that, there's an issue with where they're gonna get the employees. So a lot of employees left Maui because of this houseless issue. The other issue is that there's a challenge here in Oahu as rents keep going up, up, up. And we don't have the average house now on Oahu is $1.2 million. You have people that are just leaving the state and it goes back to housing. When people have to spend 50% of their take-home salary for housing, then that we have a big issue. And then this is a major concern that's affecting the hospitality industry because we have so labor intensive. You know, I remember, you know, during COVID there was this real big tension between the hotel workers union and the hotels. You know, you're not providing enough jobs. Now it's the other way around somehow, isn't it? At that time, it's over two, three years ago, the unions were complaining that there weren't enough jobs. There were too many union members and not enough jobs. Now it sounds like it's turned around. Can you address that? I think that is part of the challenge, you know, that there is now, it has turned around. There aren't enough employees. I know that, you know, fortunately for my students that are graduating, there's lots of opportunities. I Get Job offers listings every week for everything from front desk, even many management jobs too. They're looking for carpenters and air condition repairmen and so on. So there seems to have been an exodus of people with skills that are leaving the islands. And with that, it's coming back to haunt us because we are so labor intensive and that it's affecting the kind of service that we have. And the number of employees that can be on a shift. Now, I know that, you know, the good thing about the union is the union makes folks, you know, provide very strong medical retirement, paid vacation and a very good salary. So if you're a hotel worker and you're working, say for instance, at a local five property, you're probably making as housekeeping somewhere in the $30 range plus free medical for you and your family. So if you have a work in another property, that's non union, they'd have to be close. Well, they'll just go to the unionized property. And so those properties that are non unionized are paying no fair wage as well. They have to do that. The challenge is that we have now a shortage of positions that were mostly male dominated in the hotels and the restaurant. I mean, kitchen, stewards, these folks, what's happened is they all gone to construction because we have a big construction board. So we have more and more male areas of the hotel being pulled away to the construction and we're trying to fill them with females or with other folks that might have worked in that area. This affects service, doesn't it? It affects service. Correct. You know, a lot of experience, you know, go down to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and your wait staff tells you they've been waiting on tables there for 50 years and they have this kind of Hawaiian stick, you know, that they give you and you say, this is what I came here for. This is what I want. I want people who are warm and friendly in Aloha. But if you bring in new workers who haven't had that kind of experience, it isn't the same and it isn't the same to a tourist who's looking for that, am I right? Correct. And that's one of the things that happens is you have people and they'll ask a question like, where's Kapiolani Boulevard? And they don't even know what Kapiolani Boulevard is. Well, it's three blocks up from the hotel you work in and that's because we're having to fill positions with people who don't have the experience of living here. I know that yesterday I had one of my classes and a student did a presentation. His internship was on Maui, but he's a Maui. And he said that as you move from department to department, especially when he was in the restaurants on the front, he said the tourists love to hear things about Maui. So when they ask, oh, we might visit here, you would recommend this. So they have an idea. I remember one time I was in a steakhouse, a high-end steakhouse and I asked, I was going to decide between the ribeye and the filet. And I said, what would you recommend in the way Tris says, I don't know, I'm a vegetarian. And I just thought, this is just- Bad answer, bad answer. Wrong answer, wrong answer. And the thing was that, how do you work? Well, why does she work in that steakhouse? Because it's a high-end that she can make a lot of tips. But I mean, this is the same thing, what you mentioned. You want to hear that steak and so on. Now I know that when the Hawaii Logic and Tourism Association has their annual banquet, there are still people that have worked 45, 30, 45, 45, 50 years working for the same hotel. That is absolutely amazing. And I think that that's what, you know, that Aloha spirit that people want to have when they come to this sunset and sea destination that we have here. Now, because we're so labor intensive and we have this labor crisis, the challenge comes back to the employees that are still employed. You know, if you're supposed to have five people on the shift and you only have four, that means everybody's doing 125%, not 100%, 125%. And that gets old after a while. That gets old after a while. And then what'll happen is those four guy folks that are working there, one of them will say, I'm out. Now you got three people doing the job of five people. So now everybody has to do now 150%. And it just wears on you. You're talking about an imbalance. That's what it is. It's an imbalance, a labor imbalance. It's a capital imbalance, operational imbalance, tourist imbalance. And I wanted to go a little further on this because we know that although hotels are the engine of hospitality, I'm almost like definition, but there are so many accessory industries that are connected to hospitality. Just to mention a few of those, the vacation rentals industry. There's the restaurant industry. There's retail, the shopping centers, that industry. I mean, all of these are directly connected to the hotels and to hospitality. And it just seems to me, I'm making a guess here that they have to be affected by the challenges that the hotels are experiencing. Absolutely. The imbalance, yeah. Talk about it. Absolutely. And then don't forget, the hotel, the union, most restaurants are not unionized. Most retail are not unionized. And then I paid this thing, right? A lot of the restaurants are paid a lower wage because they live on tips. And you can see there's a number of restaurants after COVID, they made it through COVID. They closed because they couldn't get labor. They just couldn't get the labor. And I think what happened is, as we had a guest speaker at the university, he used to be a president of a major hotel chain. And he said that the hotel industry did a very poor job during COVID. He said, because they laid everybody off. And what happened is, you had a lot of people that switched industries. If you're a controller or accounting, you can do the same in a hospital as you can in a hotel. And what happened is they switched over. And during COVID, and since COVID, the medical industry is mushroomed. So they need those people. And management, it's important to know your industry so much, but part of management is just managing people. And if you have a good management skill, you can manage people whether you're managing at a restaurant or you're managing at a facility that maybe services a bank or services a hospital. Now, do you want the guy that was manager of your bar to be doing surgery? No, but managing the people that help, that supply the materials that are needed for surgery or the person that needs to be there on time to be making sure that people feel good about their job. It's very, very important. And you can see that most people leave their job because of direct relationship with their supervisor. So if you have a good manager, you can train skills. You can't train attitude. And here in Hawaii, we've been known for this Aloha spirit. And one of the things that we're doing at the Tim School is we're hopefully training the next line of managers. And we have a whole bunch of folks that are local and we want them to be the next line of managers. So that the manager can understand, just simple things such as certain terms of pigeon or just knowing, managing here is not the same as managing in Los Angeles or Chicago or New York city. Is it different? Is it different? We want to look at a vacation destination. When a customer comes here versus a customer say going to Miami Beach. In Miami, you could be a little more forward and it's okay with the customer because they are a different market. Here is a longer flight time. And with that, people expect, you know, we have Hawaii. It's Hawaiian time. Everything's Hawaii. And we can run things a little easier. Yeah, it's okay. People are very forgiving about that. Yes. It's part of the experience of coming. But let me add this though, Jerry. It sounds like, you know, we have this imbalance. And, you know, it wasn't so bad. We managed to recover in many ways from COVID. And now we have, you know, the sort of the hole in the economy in Maui and the hole in tourism and hospitality, including the hotels, the vacation rentals, the restaurants, the retail, all of those things directly affected. It seems to me that if I'm working in one of those areas, I'm heading off. I'm out of there. I don't want to wait around because actually I got to tell you if things are moving slowly for the recovery of Maui and everybody talks about it, everybody knows about it. So they're going to come to Oahu. They're going to look for balance, if you will, over here. At the same time, and this is to your point a moment ago about the Tim School, is you have to have this kind of employment, career progression. You go from this level, that level to that level, get to be an executive and so forth. But if people are moving around all the time, if they're imbalanced, if you will, if they can't stay in one place, they've got to move to another place, they're not sure they're going to get a job as good or as high up on the food chain. That disturbs the progression. So we have another level of imbalance. And a lot of this is directly related to the fact that the hospitality industry in Maui has been severely undermined. And so really what I'm asking here is, assuming all of that, what effect does it have in investment in Maui? What effect does it have going forward? Because hotels and new businesses in all those areas, they need investment. Fact is that some of these places are closing in Maui forever. And those people are out of jobs forever. They can't stay there, not for two weeks. They got to go. So the question is, what new investment comes in to rebuild the businesses that have had to close? Well, I think one of the things we have to do is be, you know, be very forward on what's going to happen. The housing that was burned in Lahaina is not going to be able to rebuild for years. Not months, it's going to be years. That's just reality. And nobody wanted to say it straight up like that. Oh, we're going to work on this, we're going to have this, that's the challenge. You know, you had families that lived in the generations. The fire happened, it's tragic. Now we got to be honest, that there won't be new housing built for years. It takes a long time to build things and it just won't happen that quickly. So there's the first thing. So how do we house those folks? Now a lot of folks have left the island, right? They moved off, they moved out of Hawaii, they moved here some, but some moved off. Now, Maui is now a tourism destination. It doesn't have any other industries, no more agriculture, they just don't have it. So the good thing about tourism, it's labor intensive, the challenge really, where do we get the labor? And when you have people that have gone through something like this, this is traumatic, are they able to come back and give that smile and give that? And how do we get them housed? So the housing is the issue, it's the foundation of what's gonna help Maui. Now is there, I heard the number of terms that the times that they mentioned that there's 25,000, 27,000 vacation rentals on the island. I think that that's an opportunity that you can put some people in. I know that they didn't want to, they want to rent it out by the week, make a lot of money, but if we make vacation rentals, not allowed, freeze it for a year or two, put a moratorium on it, then that might be a way to possibly get some folks. But again, it goes back to the basic thing of housing. And you need that, and you need housing for this labor market. Number two on Maui, you have now a lot of residents pushing back against tourists, right? Because don't forget, there are people that saved their whole life to come for a week or 10 days, to come and visit Maui, that or Hawaii, but Maui seems to be this, on 2023 before the fires, now the folks traveling to Maui was coming close to what we have here in a while. And it was never that high before. So Maui has become a premier destination, not just in price, but a number of folks that were going there. And because of that, you had parking on the weekends at the public beaches, because the tourists got all over. I have a young lady, I think last time we spoke, she was, there was a shortage of rented cars, she was renting out her car on Turo. And she was making 180 to $225 a day by renting her car. And as she said, Dr. A, I'm gonna quit my job and just rent cars on Turo. She says, no, no, no, no, don't do that. You are, you're a manager, you work hard to get there, don't do that. And what happened is that after COVID, when we had COVID, the rental car companies had to sell off their fleets because it was nowhere to park them, right? They only have parking for 30%. And because of that, they had to sell off that 70%. And we had that crisis afterwards because of the chip, there was a shortage of chips, cars weren't able to build, and then there was a shortage of cars. I mean, I have a friend that worked over at one of the high-end hotels in Maui, people walking around the pool and asking people if they have a rental car, could we rent it for me for the day, for $400? This raises a whole new issue. Out of the ashes, literally, there arises new ideas, new entrepreneurial activities, and maybe new things that actually in the long-term will help hospitality. And Maui, but in the state, there'll be new data processing. Who knows what? New arrangements that are invented to deal with the challenges. Do you see that happening? Oh yeah, I can see that there is a many, many opportunity. Like I said, the one good thing that happened since COVID-19, I feel, is that after we had that surge, right, that revenge tourism, that we've had a different type of tourist that's coming. And one of the things is that folks are looking to do is we have this term that's called regenerative tourism, where a tourist comes to the place and leaves it better than the way they found it. I've seen a number of folks that come here and they wanna give back to a beach cleanup, especially now with families and they have their kids and every one of their kids is hooked on this phone. You go to a restaurant with three kids and a mom and a dad and everybody's on the phone. Nobody's talking to each other. And I think that that's one of the things that the families are trying to do, as well as people wanna give back. They wanna keep Hawaii better so that the next generation will have some place to visit. Yeah, we should focus on that, don't you think? We should encourage that. We should encourage that in every way we can. Well, I have only one area, one more area I would like to ask you about because we're running out of time here. So we here in Oahu, and I speak for myself and the people I deal with, although we deal with a lot of people on map, we have various shows coming from them. But it seems to me that people do not see this whole in our hospitality industry that we are suffering, that we have suffered and are suffering now as affecting them all that much here on Oahu and I would guess on the Big Island and on Kauai, for that matter. And I suspect, Jerry, that it's only a matter of time because you and I have agreed that what happened on Maui will affect the whole state, the state economy. But if we haven't felt it yet, it seems likely to me that we will feel it, that it will have a gathering effect on us and the whole state will somehow be affected. Your thoughts on that? Well, I think that what happened is the amount of money that's being spent to keep the folks, just those that have been displaced in hotels, it's just way out of line, it's just too high. You can't give $1,000 a night for a hotel room for somebody that's, after 145 days, that's $145,000. That's more than a down payment on the house. We should address that and it goes back to that housing. Are there houses available for people to stay? Yes, the problem is you allowed them to be vacation rentals. What I hear you saying though is that this is gonna cost the state a lot of money. It is already costing the state millions of money, millions of dollars and that's gonna affect me. There's gonna have to be tax increases. Right. They're gonna have to pinch on benefits and so forth. And so my question to you is, when can we expect to feel the pain? We're not feeling it yet, but soon enough we will. I think the good thing is that Senator Schatz, he's got some power. He's been able to get a bunch of federal money here. We had Biden here. We've had a lot of federal money coming. We've had some money that's been promised and now maybe we might not get it because of the budget going on up there in Washington, D.C. You've had now, optics looks bad. When you're paying $1,000 a night, put a one person in a room for 145 days. That's just the optics really, really bad. And you could see where some senators from Nebraska or wherever is saying, why are we doing this? Why? When there's a hurricane, everybody stays in a tent. Right after the hurricane, because everything's white. Here, you had a fire in one area and then you still had the hotel rooms available. And the thing is that we temporarily put them there, but now the temporary is just grown and grown and grown. And like what happened with COVID, the good workers in the hotels, when you shut down those hotels, they went to, they found other jobs. They either left or they felt they went to medical. They went to areas that were growing. And that's where we have that gap that's happened with the hospitality. And we're gonna pay a price for that. We're gonna pay a price for that. Right, and that's why we have this huge amount of, I think a lot of the shortage that we're having in the hotels, et cetera, is because that middle management that left, we're putting new folks in it, just don't have that experience. Like I said earlier, 90% of everybody who leaves their job, not for more money, not because they moved away. They left because of their relationship with that supervisor. And we have, some folks have benefited. I have one student that moved off the chain very, very quickly since the COVID because there was that gap that was missing. Now, is he excelled and this young man has done a really, really good job. But that gap would not have opened. It takes years, four or five years to become a senior manager while he was able to come in in a year and a half because there's that opening. So we live in transitional times. This puts us in transitional times. And transitional times means that you have to watch out because it may bite you. At the same time, transitional times means opportunity. And so the smart guys will look for the opportunity. I just, one other thing before we close that we really have to close is that, what is your message to people? Are we going to be able to retain hospitality statewide as the principal element of our state economy? And if so, what is the most important thing for us to think about and do to maintain the franchise, to maintain the smooth operation of this huge juggernaut of tourism we have had? Well, I think one of the things is we have to do a better job of explaining to the local residents how the economics of the tourists coming here runs our state. Like I said earlier, there was gonna be almost a billion dollars in hotel tax probably this year in 2023, there was 800 million dollars. And I would, you know, the ledger has the right and that's their job is to move that money around. I would ask them to keep that money in a separate, comes in a separate account. And every time they take a hundred million dollars outside of fixed roads or get to schools or to build some kind of sewer system that they say, okay, we took this directly from the hotel tax. And then we are able to see how tourism is directly helping the local residents. And that they would see it. And we've done, we have to do a better job of showing to the local residents how people are employed, how their tax dollars are used. Yeah, they've gotta be educated. We have gotta educate them. And that is a media function, isn't it? And that's also a function of the travel industry management school. Right. The management stands for management. That's right. That's right. And so we have to do a better job of getting that out. And we've done okay, but we can do more. This new trend of regenerative tourism, that's another trend. We're doing a big research project now on the willingness to pay for locally grown food so that we can expand on local farming. At one time, when I was in college, here the agriculture is actually a higher economic value than tourism. And now it's way opposite, and we can grow. I mean, gosh. Well, you know what you're talking about, and we gotta close, but I just wanna say my last takeaway from your thoughts is we actually have an opportunity to rebrand what? And rebranding it is refreshing it and refreshing it is reselling it perhaps to people who need to hear more about us. Well, thank you, Jerry. Jerry, Bruce, and Professor of the Travel Industry Management School at Charlotte College of Business. Thank you so much for coming around. Don't leave town though. We wanna talk to you some more later. I'm not going anywhere. Mahalo, Jay. Thank you. And let me know if anything I can help. Aloha. If you liked this show, why don't you give us a like or subscribe to our channel? Thanks so much.