Hawaii's Kilauea Volcano Spooking Visitors, Bookings Down

Above, vegetation on fire from a Kilauea lava tube. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

There's really no reason for it, but tourists and some tourist companies have been spooked by the recent eruptions of Kilauea volcano on Hawaii's Big Island.

According to Reuters:

HONOLULU, Hawaii (Reuters) - Cruise ships have canceled stops on Hawaii’s Big Island. Hotel rooms will sit vacant this summer despite price cuts. 

And guest house owners and tour guides that depend on the 2 million visitors each year to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park are wondering how long their families will go without any income. 

Tourism authorities say summer bookings for hotels on Hawaii’s Big Island have fallen almost 50 percent since the volcano began spewing lava and toxic gases on May 3. 

The closure of the park, the state’s top tourist destination, alone is costing the island $166 million, the National Park Service said on Monday. 

Potential visitors to the Big Island have been spooked by images of lava torching homes, soldiers wearing gas masks and now deadly white clouds of acid and glass shards as molten rock streams into the Pacific. 

While Kilauea’s lava flows are in a small, roughly 10-square-mile rural area in the southeast Puna district, the volcano is having an impact on tourism across the Big Island, home to 200,000 people.

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