If You Marry Them, They Will Come

COMPLETED 6 NOVEMBER 2014

(Underlining and bold print by FuelMix)

LGBT Still Has Room To Grow 

Although we were unable to gather statistics to support this, several operators are reporting that the much-anticipated boom of the gay destination wedding market in Hawaii hasn't exactly unfolded as anticipated. A University of Hawaii researcher said in November of last year that a law to allow same-sex marriage in Hawaii was expected to boost tourism there by $217 million over the next three years. 

But operators are simply not seeing it. 

“In our opinion, there hasn’t really been any significant growth in this market....... We just have not seen it. It could be doing well for other people as Hawaii in general is just such a huge wedding destination, but we specifically are not seeing a major pickup in this segment.” 

 And Joelle Arriola, Classic Vacations’ product director for Hawaii and South Pacific, agrees.

“There really hasn't been much growth in the last year in the LGBT market as a whole.....but we would imagine this being a market that will continue to grow. There is just so much marketing and press releases going around on this market that it can really only go up.

 -----Hawaii Forecast:  The Latest Trends in the Aloha State, by Joe Pike, Travel Agent Central, 22 October 2014

A reader in Hawaii sent us the above link. We giggled. When we wrote about Gay Marriage we said the issue wasn't about Luuuv......it was about money. Specifically, access to same-sex benefits. We even speculated that the numbers of gay men actually getting married would not be that high.  When we wrote about the alleged power of The Pink Dollar, we suggested it might be over-hyped.

The above article brings out those themes nicely.  But rather than gloat, we'll give you our current take:

1.   Conventional gay social and political apparatchiks have a tendency to exaggerate and misrepresent.  We wrote about this before when highlighting alleged attendance figures for Gay Pride in Vancouver. The quoted article above would have been more substantive had it extracted the relevant portions of the research study that landed on the figure of US$217 Million as the gay marriage tourism in Hawaii boost over the next 3 years.  We suspect the reasons for this happy estimate were as follows:

• Keeping face;
• Attempting to show LGBT social and economic relevance;
• Positioning for grants, subsidies and good publicity;

2.   The reason there hasn't been any significant growth in the LGBT market in Hawaii:

• The figure may have been exaggerated to begin with;
• Hawaii is a "been there, done that location" for gays.  It was huge in the 1980s and 1990s when babble of "The Pink Dollar" first started;
• The Hawaiian economy slumped generally, but real estate prices soared on the back of Asian (Mainland Chinese) buyers laundering cash;
• There is no shortage of higher end exclusively gay resorts in other countries;
• The US Dollar is comparatively strong compared to rapidly debasing international currencies (even though the US has been actively debasing its currency since 2008).  It makes sense to go on a gay honeymoon in other countries, even if they marry in the US;
• There is huge income inequality in the US - more pronounced from 2008 onwards.  Checked out the numbers on Food Stamps lately....?? To imply that gay men are immune to that is naive.
• Heard the stories lately of the treatment one gets at US airports...?? (That was a major reason why Chicago didn't the get the 2016 Olympics);
• Despite the stock market hype, the real US economy is stagnant. Two gays in tuxedos, a 3-tiered wedding cake, faaa--buuu---louss champagne, some M&Ms and a bottle of poppers ain't gonna revive it - no matter how many times you say "aloha";

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