Have you seen these prices for flights between the San Francisco Bay Area and Hawaii? Someone tipped me off last night, so I started poking around Southwest and Google Flights, and wow! There are nonstop flights between a number of Bay Area and Hawaii airports for right around $100 each way. The airlines I saw advertising these cheap flights: Southwest and Hawaiian.
Usually, we pay around $500 for a roundtrip to Hawaii from here. If we’re lucky, $400.
I’m seeing $200 RT flights in October, early November, parts of December, and almost every day in January and February.
Of course, as we head into yet another Covid winter, I had to ask myself if we can count on it being safe to visit Hawaii in the next few months.
One thing I have learned through the pandemic is that I can’t count on anything. I wouldn’t fly to Hawaii right now, because Gov. David Ige asked us not to visit through the end of October.
However, this forecast posted by NPR gave me some encouragement that it may be safe and responsible to visit Hawaii after that:
If Covid infections do decline in coming months, and if our vaccines continue to provide strong protection, and given Hawaii’s strict Covid protocols, I feel like I could hope to fly there in January or Febrary.
Of course, we could easily book now on Southwest and simply cancel our flights if Covid doesn’t improve as we’re hoping. But lodging may not be so easy to deal with. I started searching for condos on Maui and the Big Island and found that many are already booked up for January. That means that if I want to go, I’ll have to book lodging now. The places I like would require cancellation a month or more in advance of the stay.
Would you take the risk of booking a Hawaiian getaway this winter?
The Miles Mom 