Island Focus - Avi Mannis

Thank you for having me.

Sure. So really, like any local business, I think our focus has been on how we can reopen safely, what we need to do in terms of our operations using the best science we have available to us to make sure that we can resume operations whenever we can resume operations with measures in place that keep our guests and our employees and our community safe. We've also been trying to make sure, and this is again no different than any other business but on a bigger scale, that we have the cash to ensure that we can weather this long period of time in which we're losing millions of dollars a day and not taking in much revenue. So that's been kind of our two core areas of focus. And then also trying to ensure that we're doing whatever we can in the community to make sure that we're helping those who we know are suffering greatly as part of this. So that's been really our principal focus. We were fortunate in that we came into this period with a great deal of economic strength. We have a very strong balance sheet. We were able to get recourse to some federal aid which has allowed us to keep all of our employees employed. In terms of that federal aid, it runs out through the end of September. So while there's a great deal of uncertainty in our future around how and when the state will reopen to air travel, we've been able to use this time to invest in putting measures in place to make sure that we're ready to do so safely when the time comes.

Yeah, it's a great point, and I don't think we go back to how it was, maybe ever. I think the industry as a whole has to look comprehensively at what we do. I think there's been an amazing amount of work across all of our partners in the visitor industry and other airlines to ensure that we have really fantastic standards in terms of cleanliness and standardization. And so the experience is going to be very, very different for guests when they arrive. But I think the most important thing is really thinking collectively through how we can reopen the air travel system and still keep our communities safe. And so we've also been working very closely with stakeholders in state government and the counties to understand what we can do, the layers that we can put in place to make sure that when we start to bring travelers in from places with higher rates of disease than we have today, which we absolutely have to do if we want to restart any semblance of an economy, that we're doing so with the right layered things in place. No one measure is ever going to be foolproof, so we need lots of layers embedded in the whole travel system to make sure that we can keep people safe. And that means that it's not an airline responsibility or a county responsibility or a state or hotel responsibility. It's really all of us working together as a community to make sure that both our visitors but also our locals who go to other places and come back are doing so in a way that's safe.

It's a great question, and it's been such a dynamic time for us as a business. We've never been through anything quite like this, and our industry is one that's been through ups and downs every five or ten years we have a crisis. A lot of it has been around communication. And as everyone has dispersed to various places, we're not operating at the same level we were before. We're operating a small fraction of our flights, so many of our front line employees are home, many of our office employees have been working from home as well. We've had to find new ways to communicate and to talk to people about what's going on. We have dialogues on big company-wide webcasts fairly often, and the answers aren't always what people want to hear. We've had to have some really tough conversations, and I think that's going to continue because I don't think even if we were to start to reopen on August 1st, it's going to be like flipping a switch for our business. So we're having difficult conversations, but we're trying to have them as transparently as possible. And also just to figure out what we can do in the community at a time when we're not using all of the resources of the business to run an airline. What are the things that we can do? So we've partnered with the DOE to help get schools ready for the school year. So last week I was up on the North Shore sanding and painting a bathroom at Haleiwa Elementary. These are things that we can do that keep everyone focused on doing something during this time of really great uncertainty.

And we've always been very deeply embedded in the community. I think the most important thing right now is that we figure out how we can reopen safely, because without that, I think this community faces very grave consequences, both economic and human, from delaying the reopening. So we're very hopeful that we're going to find ways to do this. Other destinations have figured out how to do this and to balance some of the health outcomes with the economic risks. We're very enthusiastic that we can find a way forward to do that.

I think, you know, as we get through the immediate crisis, there's nothing that we can do to get our economy going again other than reopening the visitor industry. But I think there is a really valuable conversation that we need to have with all of the stakeholders at the table, including businesses like us and the community more broadly, about how we want tourism to benefit our community and what we're going to do to sustainably diversify our economy. And certainly, as a business that is a local business that's deeply embedded in the community, we think there is a really productive dialogue to be had about that. So I'm hopeful that as we get through the immediate crisis, we can start to have those conversations.

Thank you.