Island Focus - Avi Mannis 2

Great to see you. Thank you for having me back. And yes, it is a time for more optimism than probably the last time we spoke.

Well, it's been a time when we've learned a lot. I think some of the things that we've taken away from this experience: first, how critically important it is for us as a company to take care of each other. That includes the management team thinking about how to take care of our frontline employees, our frontline employees giving us feedback, really working together to figure out how we can best take care of our guests and keep our business operating, because like many businesses, we had to stay in operation through this entire period and learn and adapt. Certainly, another lesson was remaining engaged with our community stakeholders here. We're a company that flies all over the world, and sometimes I think it is easy for us to forget how important it is for us to remain grounded here in Hawaii and to remain engaged with our stakeholders at the local level. A lot of the policy changes that really affected travel have happened at the county level recently, so ensuring that we stay engaged with stakeholders, understand what's going on in individual communities, and understand how we can best respond to those needs has been important to us. Then I think maybe the last lesson I would take away from this is just how important it is to be guided by our sense of purpose and who we want to be as a company. So many of the decisions that we had to make in this period of time were financial decisions that were challenging. We really had to be guided not so much by the numbers on the page but by who we were as a brand, who we were in this community, and the role we wanted to play. So that's been really important for us as well.

And Hawaiian Airlines, by virtue of the name, is recognized all over the world as a representative of Hawaii. The opportunity to go and do some really extraordinary things during this period of time has been a great one for our company. One example that I'll talk about a little bit is testing. The state has decided that it is important for people who travel here to be tested before they come so that we can keep our community safe. All of a sudden, the challenge presented itself to us of how we could, as Hawaii's airline, make testing as affordable and accessible for people who wanted to travel as we possibly could. We ended up setting up our own chain of testing labs. We now have our own proprietary testing labs, I think 10 locations in the U.S. mainland. That was something I would never have imagined as someone in management in an airline, that we would be running a chain of testing laboratories. But it was something we had to do to adapt to the moment and to make sure that we were not just operating commercially but really making sure that as many people who came here were tested as possible. That really depends on making it as easy and affordable as possible. So that was an opportunity and a moment where I think our team really rose to the challenge and were able to innovate in a really exciting way. But more than that, I think just how we represent Hawaii, the fact that we have Hawaiian in our name gives us some opportunities as a brand but also some responsibility. It's been very important for us over the course of this to help support other businesses in our community who've really been suffering over the course of the pandemic. When we are talking to visitors about coming here, to make it very clear that while this is a very special time to visit Hawaii — I think it's actually a wonderful time to visit Hawaii — it comes with a set of responsibilities to ensure that visitors are keeping our community safe. We've felt a very strong burden of responsibility to make sure that we were communicating that to the people who traveled on Hawaiian Airlines.

I think that's true. We all live here for the most part, so what happens in our community is of great consequence to all of us. I think we all felt a sense of collective responsibility, whether that was putting something on our website or whether that was individual flight attendants or guest services agents interacting with our guests and answering their questions about what they need to do to get tested or what they should do when they come here. It is an important part of our responsibility. As you said, it's also tremendously important that we let visitors feel welcomed back. Our economic recovery as a community is going to depend on the visitor industry. Diversification is important, but nothing will get the engine of our economy moving faster. We've spent the last year telling people justifiably that now is not the time to come to Hawaii, and there is a lot of work for all of us to do to make sure that our visitors feel welcomed back.

You know, as we start to look at the future and we're less worried about getting through each month, it is incredibly important that we all continue this dialogue that we've started over the course of COVID about how we grow our economy sustainably, how we make sure that we take the lessons over the last year and build them into having a more resilient economy and a more cohesive community.

We look forward to welcoming everyone back. Thank you. Mahalo.