After we got back from our 13-day trip to Hawaii, we got asked several questions about planning and budgeting for the trip. In this post, we will break down our planning and spending by categorizing our expenses into 5 buckets — Flights, Accommodation, Car rental and inter-island transfers, Food, and Activities. The last one listed here, i.e. Activities, is an optional one in that you can get by with spending very little, or you can really splurge (sky is the limit here). We live in the mid-west and it is a 11 hours-long journey to get to Hawaii. We will probably not visit Hawaii again in the near future and thus wanted to do a bunch of different things on the islands during our visit. If you live along the west coast you might head there several times. And in that case, many of the ideas listed here will still apply to you, but there may be bits of this post that won’t.
Our trip was in Mid-April 2023. April and September are shoulder seasons when crowds are smaller, and prices are lower. We started planning for it in November — nearly 6 months in advance, and would highly recommend that you do the same, if not earlier. I have heard of folks with kids who plan even a year out in advance. Several of the popular/touristy places require reservations that open anywhere between 60–90 days in advance (such as the Haleakala sunrise reservation, and Ha’ena state park permit) and sell out within 5 minutes. So, it is important that you have your plans and itinerary ( at least roughly) figured out before you need to make those reservations.
Planning earlier helps reduce costs to some extent, but more importantly, it helps in spending money in smaller chunks instead of one big chunk. And for Hawaii, this is all the more important since it’s an expensive place to visit.
Flights
We saw some economy saver awards on United in Nov 2022 and booked our flights from MSP — Maui via Denver our return HNL — MSP via San Francisco. We had United miles accumulated from the Sign-Up-Bonus of United Gateway card (no annual fee credit card) and a few other long and short haul flights over the last couple of years. So our flights technically cost us nothing. At the time of our booking, return tickets from MSP to Maui were hovering around 600 USD per person. It quickly went up to 800–1000 USD per person when we checked back towards the end of December/early January.
Accommodation
We stayed at AirBnBs throughout our time in Hawaii. We were in Maui, Kauai, and Oahu. All islands in Hawaii have restrictions on the regions where AirBnBs are legally allowed. Legal AirBnBs have a Certificate of Registration, which requires them to show the Tax ID in their listing. We spent an average of 250 USD per night, and a total of 2800 USD for 11 nights.
In Maui, we stayed in Paia which is unusual (Lahaina/Kaanapali and Kihei are the most touristy places with several resorts and condos). But, we found a fantastic, air-conditioned, and clean AirBnB in Paia with a full kitchen that was within our budget and reserved it.
We love the pay Part Now — Part Later feature of AirBnB as it allows us to plan and budget without feeling overwhelmed. We also don’t end up having to pay 2800 USD in the span of one day. We typically have to pay about 20% of the cost upfront and on a later date (reminders set up in calendars), we set up an auto-pay feature, and the payment is deducted from the designated credit card or AirBnB wallet balance. This gives us a chance to save up aggressively by cutting down on other items from our monthly budget before we pay the remaining amount. We must mention that this works well only if a monthly budget is strictly followed.
Another option is to plan further out and get a hotel co-branded credit card such as the Chase World of Hyatt, Amex Marriott Bonvoy, etc, and use that to book your stay(fully or partially). We went with the AirBnB route because we like to cook most of our food, which for Hawaii saves a lot of money, as you will see below.
Car rental and inter-island transport
We used a corporate discount code for our rental cars. We reserved via National’s Emerald Aisle access (no waiting in line for pick-ups) and picked up and returned our cars at the airport. For the 4 days in Maui, 3 days in Kauai and 1 day in Oahu, we paid a total of 400 USD for the rental car including taxes and fees, and 160 USD in gas bringing our rental car expenses to 560 USD.
On Oahu, public transport (The Bus) is fantastic and we used it on all days except one. We got our Holo cards at the ABC store on our first day and loaded it up online every morning. The total cost of public transport for the two of us came to 45 USD. On our last day in Oahu, we rented a car and drove to the North Shore of Oahu and returned it the same evening before we boarded our flight back to the mainland US. Oahu’s parking is notoriously expensive and difficult to find. Overnight parking costs anywhere between 25–30 USD. Public transport allowed us to enjoy the island at a more relaxed pace. The routes that the buses take are so scenic, and all we did was stare out from the window and before we realized it, we had reached our destination stop. If you have no kids or are willing to explore at a relaxed pace, we’d strongly urge you to use public transport in Oahu. We got a free upgrade to a Ford Mustang convertible for our one-day rental in Oahu, which was perfect as it allowed us to experience a convertible without having to pay too much. While convertibles look cool, in reality we found it to be a hassle and would have regretted renting it for the entire duration of the trip.
We had two inter-island transfers — one from Maui to Kauai, and another from Kauai to Oahu. Our Kauai — Maui flight was “free” since we used United’s excursionist perk for our round-trip MSP-Hawaii tickets. Our Kauai-Oahu flight was via Southwest and cost us 38USD per person and came with 2 included checked-in bags per person. Hawaiian Airlines is in general more expensive than Southwest — we found the tickets to be priced at around 120 USD per person.
Another important thing to note about inter-island travel is that you should always expect a delay. And with morning or mid-afternoon flights, delays can cause inter-island transfers to take up the entire day. To combat this, we booked late afternoon/evening flights on both our inter-island transfers ( 3 pm for Maui-Kauai, and 6 pm for Kauai-Oahu). In addition, we also scheduled an early morning activity such as the Haleakala NP in Maui (sunrise at 5:30 am, followed by hiking until 10 am), and the NaPali rafting adventure in Kauai that started at 7:30 am and ended at 1 pm. We finished both these activities and were able to get food and drive to the airport with more than 2 hours to spare. Upon reaching our destination, we grabbed dinner and hit the bed early.
Food
We cooked for the most part, but also enjoyed meals from local food trucks, self-service restaurants, and two full-service restaurants. Groceries cost us about 80 USD — fortunately, we had Target coupons for the entire amount and therefore our groceries effectively cost us nothing. We shopped at the Target on our first evening in Maui and topped it off with an occasional purchase at Kauai, and Oahu. Other than the olive oil bottle ( we brought back with us), we used up everything we bought. We packed sandwiches, wraps, etc. for lunch and cooked dinner in the AirBnB. We had the occasional drink and a snack/second lunch during the afternoons. Some of the places we ate at include Anatta’s Thai Street food, Thai Food by Pranee, Tiki Tacos, Miss Arepa, Ganesh Dosa (always a joy to run into a Dosa restaurant), Sunrise Shack, Olena Cafe, and Leonard’s Malasadas. We also had the most delicious waffles and acai bowls at Waffle and Berry (just go there, don’t even think! ). We enjoyed a fine-dining meal at The Plantation House by Gaylord’s in Kauai on the occasion of Sruthi’s birthday! The dessert was on-the-house which was very sweet of them. We had vegan Japanese food at Tane Vegan Izakaya, easily the best Sushi we have ever had. Our food costs came to a total of 460 USD for 13 days (35 USD per day).
Eating all meals at restaurants/food trucks in Hawaii will cost at least 100 USD per day, and for a total of 13 days, that’s 1300 USD — a lot of money. By following the part cooking, and part eating out plan, we brought our food costs down to a third of that while still enjoying several wonderful restaurants and food trucks. In the days preceding our trip, we barely ate out so we saved all our monthly restaurant budget for our Hawaii trip. We ended up well within our budget for the combined category of restaurants + groceries that month despite going on a big trip.
Activities
Our second most expensive category of the trip was activities. We did the following activities —
Guided Turtle town snorkeling in Maui with Zephyr adventures Maui — included photos and videos, as well as all equipment. We saw about 12 turtles and several schools of fishes and sea-creatures such as the red pencil urchin. And the entire snorkeling trip was about 60 mins with 30 mins of additional pre-snorkel instructions. The fact that this was guided helped calm our nerves as we were in over 20 ft deep waters and had neither snorkeled before nor do we know swimming. Once we were in the water, it took us only a few mins to get comfortable and it was absolutely beautiful from then on. This experience allowed us to snorkel in other locations such as the Ke’e beach on our own.
Cost 240 USD
Doors off NaPali coast helicopter ride with Mauna Loa Helicopters — total ride time of about 65 mins, and it was a private tour. It is basically a grand tour of Kauai with an opportunity to see inaccessible waterfalls, lush green scenery and the breathtaking NaPali coast.
Cost 840 USD
NaPali adventure boat tour with Blue Ocean Adventures on the zodiac rigid hull inflatable boats. A total of 5 hours, and including some fantastic and thrilling maneuvers, dolphin sightings, cave explorations, NaPali coast, several opportunities of jump off the boat into the ocean, snacks and drinks.
Cost 400 USD
UTV Raptor tour at Kualoa Ranch through the rugged terrain, streams, dirt road and valleys, and several Jurassic franchise shoot locations, and fantastic views of Oahu throughout the tour.
Cost 300 USD
In addition to all the paid activities listed above, we jumped into several waterfalls on The Road to Hana, snorkeled on our own in beaches such as Ke’e Beach, Kapalua Bay, hiked trails in Wai’anapanapa state park, Ha’ena state park, Wai’mea canyon state park, hiked along the Martian-like landscapes on the Sliding Sands trail. We also saw the milky-way from the Haleakala summit at the cusp of night-time and blue hour, then caught the sun rise above the clouds from 10,000 ft above the sea level, and chilled out at Waikiki beach (Oahu), Po’ipu beach (Kauai), Sunset Beach (Oahu North shore) and Ho’okipa Beach (Maui). Parking is by and large free in most places, and parking reservations (made 90 days in advance for Haleakala and 60 days in advance for Wai’anapanapa and Ha’ena) cost us in total less than 50 USD.
Our total cost for all the activities came out to 1800 USD or 900 USD per person. We had a ton of fun, and would highly recommend them all if your budget permits.
Final Thoughts
We spent a total of 5800 USD for the entire trip for 2 people including tipping, uber to and from our residence, etc — 450 USD per day. We clicked a ton of pictures, and came back home with memories we will cherish for our lifetime!
BabuSoge 
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