Hawaii’s September hotel numbers are out, and Waikiki looks almost exactly like last year: about three of every four rooms filled, at an average rate a few dollars higher. Kauai is the other story, with occupancy cut by more than a third after Hurricane Lowell. We read the state’s report and the coverage. For our own stay it changes nothing, because we book with HGV points. If you pay cash for a Waikiki hotel this fall, though, there is something here worth knowing.
What happened
On October 20, 2026, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported on September hotel performance, citing a report released by STR on Monday, Oct. 19. The state’s own version is the September 2026 Hawai’i Hotel Performance Report, posted on DBEDT’s infrastructure reports page. The numbers below come from that report and compare September 2026 with September 2025.
| September 2026 | Occupancy | Change | Average daily rate | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Statewide | 69.7% | +0.1 pts | $324.84 | +3.2% |
| Oahu | 75.9% | +0.9 pts | $265.31 | +2.1% |
| Waikiki | 76.7% | +0.2 pts | $251.39 | +1.5% |
| Maui County | 67.0% | +7.6 pts | $454.89 | +7.4% |
| Island of Hawaii | 64.0% | +2.5 pts | $372.06 | +6.1% |
| Kauai | 47.2% | -26.9 pts | $343.02 | -10.4% |
The report says Lowell made landfall on Kauai and Niihau on September 7, 2026, with flooding, strong winds and power outages. Kauai was 74.2% full in September 2025. This year it was 47.2%, and room revenue fell 40.7%, to $26.4 million. Maui kept recovering from the 2023 wildfires and posted the biggest gains.
The hotel people in the Star-Advertiser story were not cheering. Jerry Gibson, president of the Hawai’i Hotel Alliance, said the gains are measured against an unusually weak fall 2025, when government shutdown concerns hurt travel. “I don’t see anything good on the horizon,” he told the paper. Lynette Eastman, general manager of the Surfjack Hotel & Swim Club in Waikiki, said soft demand has led to aggressive discounting across Waikiki, with some boutique and mid-range properties offering rates near $99 a night. “October could be worse than September,” she said.
What it changes for a Waikiki stay
The headline numbers say Waikiki was steady. On an average September night, 76.7% occupancy means roughly 23 of every 100 hotel rooms in the survey sat empty. The average rate of $251 is also below Waikiki’s average for the first nine months of the year, which the report puts at $264.78. September is not a month when Waikiki sells out.
The more useful lines are lower in the report’s Oahu table, where it splits hotels by class:
| Oahu, September 2026 | Occupancy | Change | Average daily rate | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Luxury | 70.1% | +1.7 pts | $431.80 | +3.5% |
| Upper Upscale | 78.5% | +0.7 pts | $278.74 | +2.6% |
| Upscale | 76.9% | +3.4 pts | $191.99 | -2.5% |
| Upper Midscale | 78.3% | +2.6 pts | $157.77 | +0.4% |
| Midscale & Economy | 69.3% | -7.4 pts | $125.14 | -1.8% |
Four of the five classes filled more rooms than a year earlier. The exception is the cheapest one, Midscale & Economy, which lost 7.4 points of occupancy and some rate. Upscale hotels filled more rooms, but at a lower average rate than last year, while the classes above and just below them held or raised theirs. That is consistent with the discounting Eastman described, although the report does not break out boutique hotels or Waikiki by class. So the $99 figure is believable as a description of some properties, but it is one manager’s account in one newspaper story, not a published price list. We would not plan a budget around it.
Two more things worth knowing before you read too much into the averages. First, the survey covers hotels with 20 or more rooms, and the report says vacation rentals and timeshare properties were not included. Second, it is September only. Eastman’s warning about October is a prediction, and the state’s October report is not out yet.
If you read our post on HTA’s tourism emergency request, you may remember a board member putting Oahu booking demand down 25%. That was a different measure: booking demand, which the paper tied to Expedia data, with no period given. This report counts the nights that actually got sold in September. Both can be true at once, and together they point the same way for the coming weeks: Waikiki hotels have rooms to fill.
What we would do — and what we wouldn’t
Our own stay doesn’t move. We stay at Hokulani Waikiki on HGV points, and the points for a given week come from HGV’s published chart for that season, not from what hotels down the street are charging this month. Timeshares are not in this survey at all, so there is nothing here for us to act on.
If we were paying cash for a Waikiki hotel this fall, we’d lock in a refundable rate and look once more before the cancellation deadline. That is about the least effort a soft market asks of you. Settle the dates, pick a hotel you would be glad to stay at even if the price never moved, and book a rate you can cancel. Then set a single calendar reminder, ahead of the hotel’s own cancellation cutoff, to price the same room for the same nights. If it has dropped by enough to be worth ten minutes, rebook and cancel the first one. If not, do nothing. No price alerts, no checking every morning.
We wouldn’t chase the $99 headline. The cheapest class is the one that weakened, and the cheap room that matters is the one in the block you actually want to walk around. Without a car, a few extra blocks every time you go out cost more than the nightly savings are worth to us. We’d choose the location first, and compare the total at checkout, with taxes and any resort fee, rather than the nightly number on the first screen.
We’d plan as if Waikiki will be busy. Three of every four rooms filled is still a lot of people on Kalakaua. A softer fall might make a restaurant reservation a little easier to get, but we wouldn’t count on empty sidewalks.
If a Kauai side trip is part of your plan, confirm with the specific hotel and the area directly before you pay, because September’s averages say nothing about which places are open now.
Before you plan around this
- These are September averages from the state’s report, which uses STR survey data weighted by location and hotel class. They describe the market, not the rate any one hotel will quote you.
- The report notes that STR changed categories for some properties starting January 2026, so 2025 figures may differ from earlier reports.
- The $99 rates and the October outlook come from a hotel manager quoted by the Star-Advertiser. The story doesn’t name which hotels.
- The October report will tell us whether Eastman was right. DBEDT posts each month on its infrastructure reports page, under Hotel Performance.
We checked all of this on October 21, 2026. Already booked on a refundable rate? One more look before the deadline is all we’d do. Not booked and paying cash? This looks like a fall when a refundable rate and one second look could save a little money with almost no effort.
This is our owner experience as of October 2026, not financial advice; HGV point costs come from the Hilton Grand Vacations member portal, and hotel rates change daily.
