Goodbye Aloha

If you go to Aloha Airlines website, you will receive a message that I find kind of chilling: "Sorry....after more than 60 years of serving Hawaii, Aloha Airlines is no longer operating". This might not be big news on the Mainland, but it has occupied much of Hawaii's news this week.

So what does this mean for Hawaii? It means 1,900 people lost their jobs. Some of the people who lost their jobs were married with small children. It means thousands of stranded travelers scrambling to find a way to their destination. Four days after the announcement the newspaper showed pictures of people still waiting to fly home. It means Hawaiian residents now only have two airlines to choose from when flying to the other islands. One of these airlines, go! Mesa, has been struggling financially for a long time.

The other surviving airline here is Hawaiian Airlines, which is the #1 airline serving the Hawaiian islands. When Aloha announced they were closing, they stepped up and allowed travelers with Aloha tickets to fly standby with them. Since priority was given to these individuals, that meant that any Hawaiian employee who wanted to use their benefit of flying free via stand-by were out of luck. This unfortunate set of circumstances affected our friends, Marty and Heather. Heather works for Hawaiian Airlines and they had arranged for Marty's parents to fly stand-by from California to Honolulu for free. When news of Aloha's closure was publicized, they had to fork over $1,000 to fly them here. Ouch.

The last flight operated by Aloha was from Kahului, Maui to Honolulu. The news camera showed people coming off the plane with leis and tears sliding down their cheeks. When I watched this on tv I couldn't help but think that this could have been us. We flew from Kahului to Honolulu just eleven days prior. What if we had been some of the unfortunate ones stranded in Maui for days? I suppose there could be worse things.... after all, it's not like being stranded in Chicago during a blizzard.

And now ATA is closing down. Unlike Aloha, they didn't even give a warning that this was coming. I felt bad for all the people who were flying with them and got the news from a posted letter at the abandoned check-in counters. I saw on the news that a couple had to pay $2,000 to get home. They might have had a fantastic time here in Hawaii, but those memories will forever be tarnished because after their wallets were emptied from vacationing here, they had to dig deeper in their pockets just to leave. The way ATA handled things left me with a bad taste in my mouth. They might have flown into Hawaii, but they certainly didn't have Hawaii's aloha spirit.