Nov. 14–With same-sex marriage legal in Hawaii as of Wednesday, the local wedding industry is gearing up for hundreds of same-sex ceremonies on the islands during the next several years.
It’s also looking forward to hundreds of millions more tourism dollars that likely will accompany those weddings, as a local economic study shows.
“We are ready to go,” said Keane Akao, managing partner with Perfectly Planned Hawaii, a new local company marketing to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender couples looking to marry. Akao said he and his business partner started organizing the company about five months ago, even before Gov. Neil Abercrombie called for a special legislative session to weigh same-sex marriage.
They’ve received two dozen inquiries for their services in the past two weeks alone as lawmakers debated the issue, he said.
“It was a gamble,” Akao said of the early planning. Now, the company plans to accommodate about 50 weddings in the next year. “We’re highly optimistic,” he said.
Meanwhile, on Maui, Hawaiian Island Weddings President Tim Clark received a call from an LGBT website on Wednesday — hours after Abercrombie signed the same-sex marriage bill into law — asking if he’d be interested in advertising his company and finding new wedding clients.
“She was right on it,” Clark said of the employee who called. “She just started making phone calls.”
Clark said his Hawaiian Island Weddings accommodates civil unions in the islands, and that he’s changing the website to attract LGBT clients looking to wed.
Same-sex marriages in Hawaii would translate into $217 million in visitor spending in 2014-16, a July report by the Economic Research Organization at the University of Hawaii found.
That tourism and ceremony-related spending would also translate into $10.2 million in general excise tax revenues for the state in that two-year period, according to the study.
More than 3,200 same-sex couples — both local and from abroad — would marry in Hawaii within the first three years of legalization, according to the Williams Institute, a research arm on sexual-orientation law and policy at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law.
Despite Hawaii’s oncoming wave of gay weddings, Clark and other local planners said Wednesday that they don’t expect to see more than a modest boost to their individual businesses — perhaps up to 15 percent — because there are so many local companies to absorb the demand.
“The industry is huge,” Clark said.
Clark conservatively estimated about 150 such wedding planning businesses operate in the state. The influx of gay weddings even in a tourist destination such as Hawaii could eventually subside as more mainland states legalize gay marriage, he added.
Last year, the state saw more than 23,700 marriages, including those of local residents, and 730 civil unions, according to the state Health Department.
Clark said he works with about 30 ministers on Kauai, Oahu, Maui and Hawaii island. About three-fourths of them are comfortable officiating same-sex civil union ceremonies, and he expects that ratio to stay about the same for gay weddings.
“There will be an increase. No doubt about it,” Tracy Flanagan, owner of another Maui-based planning business, A Dream Wedding Maui Style LLC, said of revenues from same-sex weddings. “It’s going to be difficult to some people (to accept), but to me, I’m just so glad that we can welcome everyone with the aloha spirit. I think they deserve it.”
