John's first Hawaiʻi trip sets the direction
The site grew out of John Derrick's first visit to Hawaiʻi and the travel research that followed.
Newsroom
What's new at Hawaii Guide
What we have been building at Hawaii-Guide — new tools, live data, and audio, announced as they ship. We are a small, family-run guide to the Hawaiian Islands, and this is where we share what is new for the travelers who use us.
At a glance
A quick reference for journalists, partners, and anyone writing about HawaiiGuide.
CompanyHawaiiGuide, an independent, family-run guide to the Hawaiian Islands.
FoundedGrew out of John Derrick's first Hawaiʻi trip in 2002; publishing under the HawaiiGuide name since 2003.
TeamRun by John and Tori Derrick, with island-by-island guide content and traveler tools built for practical trip planning.
FocusHawaii travel guides, live conditions, planning tools, cost calculators, audio briefings, and responsible travel resources.
Positioning
HawaiiGuide Intelligence (HGI)
We think of HawaiiGuide Intelligence (HGI) as a Hawaii travel intelligence ecosystem: island guides, live conditions, maps, itineraries, cost tools, alerts, audio, and booking resources connected to help travelers plan the right Hawaii trip. Its simple visitor-facing promise is the Islands, in real time.
Instead of asking visitors to stitch together dozens of disconnected tabs, HawaiiGuide gives them one practical planning layer for deciding where to go, when to visit, what to book, what to avoid, and how each island fits their dates, budget, pace, and interests.
Island-by-island guides
Live conditions and alerts
Planning tools and calculators
Maps, itineraries, audio, and booking context
Company timeline
Selected public milestones from HawaiiGuide's history and recent platform work.
HawaiiGuide begins publishing
The HawaiiGuide name becomes the public home for island-by-island Hawaii travel guidance.
Coverage expands statewide
HawaiiGuide grows beyond an initial island focus into full state guide coverage for the main Hawaiian Islands.
First Maui and Kauai guidebooks are produced
The guidebook work broadens the site from web publishing into downloadable and printable trip-planning resources.
Client services begin
HawaiiGuide starts offering services for Hawaii travel businesses alongside its traveler-facing guide work.
Mobile-first responsive rebuild
The site moves into a mobile-first responsive experience built around Hawaii travel research and planning.
John goes full time and traffic crosses 1 million annual users
HawaiiGuide becomes John's full-time focus; legacy GA3 data records the site's first validated year above 1 million users.
The team expands
Additional help comes into the business as the guide, client, and publishing workload grows.
Tori goes full time and first bookings begin
Tori joins the work full time, and HawaiiGuide begins handling its first traveler booking pathways.
Pandemic travel restrictions reshape Hawaii planning
COVID-era restrictions turn Hawaii travel research into a fast-changing rules, safety, and reopening problem.
Revenge travel takes off and the brand is redesigned
Visitor demand rebounds sharply; legacy GA3 data records 13.2 million users while HawaiiGuide moves through a major brand redesign.
AI changes the publishing workflow
New AI tools prompt a publishing pivot toward faster research, stronger revision workflows, and more structured content operations.
First AI chatbots
HawaiiGuide begins experimenting with conversational tools for traveler questions and trip-planning guidance.
First AI integrations
AI moves from standalone chat experiments into more integrated publishing and planning workflows.
Live conditions and planning tools expand
Ocean, weather, trail, road, jellyfish, whale, sunrise, itinerary, and cost-planning tools move into dedicated traveler pages.
AI trip planning and audio features launch
Hawaii Concierge, narrated page summaries, pronunciation audio, and self-guided route audio add new ways to plan and listen.
Daily briefings, international pages, and live dashboards mature
Aloha Today, country welcome pages, and Hawaii at a Glance bring daily updates and live data into clearer public workflows.
Passport, routes, and planning tools become a connected trip layer
HawaiiGuide Passport, Start Anywhere, audio route checkpoints, local-dish routes, contextual tool recommendations, and the public changelog make the platform work more visible.
App, Today, field guides, Nature Lens, and booking tools launch
The July push adds the Hawaii Guide app page, HawaiiGuide Today, illustrated field guides, a My Trip-aware scavenger hunt, Nature Lens photo ID, When Should You Book Hawaii, and expanded Hawaii Eats discovery.
Media inquiries
For press, partnership, or attribution questions, send the request through our contact page and include the outlet, deadline, topic, and any asset needs. Logos and approved boilerplate are available in the brand kit.
- Use HawaiiGuide as one word.
- Link references to www.hawaii-guide.com.
- Use supplied logos without recoloring, stretching, or effects.
HawaiiGuide introduces memorable shortcuts for each stage of a Hawaii trip
Addresses such as hawaiiguide.app, hawaiiguide.it, hawaiiguide.today, and hawaiiguide.live give travelers a direct way back to the matching HawaiiGuide tool.
HawaiiGuide Shortcuts turn product-aligned web addresses into memorable entrances to the same HawaiiGuide platform. Travelers can build an itinerary at hawaiiguide.it, carry the app at hawaiiguide.app, return to a saved trip at hawaiiguide.me, open the daily trip dashboard at hawaiiguide.today, or check current island conditions at hawaiiguide.live. The broader family includes addresses for the HawaiiGuide Passport, tours, vacation packages, videos, news, products, and company resources. Each shortcut points to its matching destination while the canonical content remains on www.hawaii-guide.com.
A new When Should You Book Hawaii tool turns seasonal rates into timing guidance
The tool compares month-by-month lodging patterns, lead-time guidance, and booking urgency so travelers can see when waiting is risky.
When Should You Book Hawaii? uses HawaiiGuide's rate and seasonality data to give travelers a plain-language booking verdict by island, month, and trip context. It is meant to sit between broad "best time to visit" advice and a booking decision: showing when a month looks favorable, when the sample is limited, and when travelers should move faster because rates, crowds, or reservation pressure make waiting less attractive.
Hawaiʻi Nature Lens connects photo ID with the field-guide scavenger hunt
Travelers can identify reef fish, birds, flowers, trees, and other field-guide finds, then check matching scavenger-hunt items into My Trip.
Hawaiʻi Nature Lens adds a camera-based discovery layer to HawaiiGuide. Upload or take a photo of a reef fish, bird, flower, tree, or other field-guide subject and the tool returns a careful identification with confidence notes. When the match belongs to the illustrated field-guide scavenger hunt, the result can be checked off with one tap and saved into My Trip. The tool is designed as a visitor-facing helper, not a scientific authority: it asks users to confirm the match and treats uncertain IDs cautiously.
HawaiiGuide OS gives the app a home-screen style dashboard
A searchable, filterable launcher gathers 24 of HawaiiGuide's planning and live-conditions tools into one home screen, organized by where a traveler is in the trip.
HawaiiGuide OS opens at hawaii-guide.com/os as a home-screen style dashboard: an app-icon grid for tools like Today, My Trip, Conditions, Beach Finder, Trail Status, and Cost Explorer, plus live search and filter chips grouped by trip moment (Start, Before, On Island, Explore, Book). The app landing page now links directly to it, so travelers who add HawaiiGuide to their home screen have a one-tap path into the full dashboard rather than the site's tool catalog page.
Illustrated Hawaiʻi field guides launch with a My Trip-aware scavenger hunt
A printable and tappable guide collection for birds, flowers, fruit, volcanic landscapes, snorkel life, and other Hawaii finds.
HawaiiGuide now has a dedicated illustrated field-guide hub with guide art, larger previews, print-ready downloads, and a scavenger hunt that can save progress into My Trip. The collection started with visual guides for several Hawaii nature and place themes and quickly expanded to fourteen guide sets. It is designed for families, first-time visitors, repeat travelers, and anyone who wants a more observational trip: spot the thing, learn what it is, and keep track of what you found.
HawaiiGuide adds an app landing page and a trip-aware Today dashboard
The July app push brings offline planning, owned-guide awareness, and a daily dashboard for current or upcoming trips into clearer public view.
The new app landing page explains HawaiiGuide's browser-based app experience: saved plans, offline-friendly route pages, live conditions, and guidebook ownership that can follow a traveler across paired devices. HawaiiGuide Today adds a daily dashboard that can follow the current or upcoming trip context instead of making every visitor start from a blank island choice. Together, these updates make the site feel more like a planning companion before and during a trip.
Twenty free audio routes, covering all four major islands
Narrated driving and walking guides for Hawaii's classic routes — the Road to Hana, Chain of Craters Road, Waimea Canyon, and more — free in the browser, no app to install.
Our self-guided audio routes have grown into a collection of twenty: eighteen narrated driving guides and two walking tours, spanning Oahu, Maui, the Big Island, and Kauai. Each route breaks a drive — or a walk through Waikiki or Pearl Harbor — into curated stops with audio narration, mileage and drive times, maps, and links to our full guides for each stop. A route can be saved to your phone before you set out, so the audio still plays on stretches with no cell coverage, like the back half of the Road to Hana or Saddle Road between the volcanoes. Narration is voiced by our two AI narrators, Mele and Kani; the scripts, fact-checking, and editorial calls are ours. Every route is free and plays in the browser with no app and no signup. The collection is still growing, and a GPS Drive Mode that plays each stop automatically as you approach it is in development.
The HawaiiGuide Passport: stamp the islands as you go
A free visit tracker across four collections — stamp the beaches, waterfalls, and scenic lookouts you visit, and earn a badge for every audio route you finish. No app, no account.
The HawaiiGuide Passport turns a trip into a collection. Open any beach, waterfall, or scenic lookout page on the site and tap "I've Been Here" — the stamp lands in your passport, dated, and your progress fills in island by island. At launch the passport holds four collections: 111 beaches, 25 waterfalls we judged genuinely reachable or viewable from a public spot, 26 scenic lookouts, and our 20 audio routes. Routes play by harder rules — their badges can't be tapped in. Check in at every stop on a route and the badge is earned on its own. Stamp while you're physically at a spot and it gains a gold "Stamped at the spot" pin; your location is checked once, on your device, and never sent anywhere. Honor-system stamps made from the couch count exactly the same. Everything is free, plays in the browser with no app and no signup, lives on your device, and follows you between phone and laptop if you use My Trip sync.
One dashboard for live Hawaii conditions across all four islands
Surf, weather, jellyfish risk, whale activity, trail and road status, volcano updates, airport boards, and gas prices in one place.
Hawaii at a Glance pulls our live-conditions tools into a single statewide view. Behind it sit individual dashboards travelers can go deep on — an ocean report drawing on NOAA buoys, trail and road status, a lunar-cycle jellyfish calendar, whale-season timing, USGS volcano status, and live airport arrival and departure boards. The data refreshes on its own; there is nothing for a reader to update.
Welcome pages for visitors from a dozen countries
Entry requirements, ESTA, customs allowances, and practical arrival details tailored by country of origin.
International travelers arrive with different paperwork, and the answers change by passport. Our country welcome pages cover entry rules, ESTA, and customs details for visitors from Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, Japan, and several more, gathered on a single hub. A weekly automated check watches the underlying government sources so the pages flag when a rule changes.
Trip-cost tools wired to live Hawaii pricing data
A cost explorer and a set of calculators for lodging, rental cars, dining, and gas that track real numbers automatically.
The Cost Explorer and the calculators behind it read live data so the estimates stay close to reality on their own. Lodging pulls from the state's monthly DBEDT hotel and vacation-rental reports, gas pulls from a daily AAA scrape, and the rental-car tool reflects current island rates. The goal is a trip-budget number a traveler can trust without us hand-editing prices every week.
Aloha Today: a daily Hawaii briefing, rebuilt every morning
A short audio rundown of Hawaii surf, weather, park status, and what is happening this week — regenerated each day from live conditions data.
Aloha Today is a roughly three-minute Hawaii briefing that publishes every morning at 5 a.m. HST. Each episode is built fresh from the same live data that powers our dashboards — weather, volcano status, surf, National Park Service alerts, and this week's events — so an overnight change shows up in the next morning's episode. It is narrated by an AI voice; the scripts, fact-checking, and editorial calls are handled by us. It is free, runs no ads in the audio, and needs no signup.
A narrated audio layer across the site
Listen to page summaries, hear Hawaiian words pronounced, and follow narrated self-guided driving routes.
Hundreds of pages now carry a short narrated summary you can play instead of read, voiced by our two AI narrators, Mele and Kani. The same audio work drives tap-to-hear pronunciation for Hawaiian words and place names — chosen for clear, accurate pronunciation — and a growing set of narrated self-guided driving routes for the islands' classic drives.
An AI concierge and a day-by-day itinerary builder
Chat with a Hawaii concierge grounded in our own island data, then build and save a real schedule for your trip.
The concierge is a chat tool grounded in our island guides, hotels, and tours, so its answers come from our data rather than the open web. The itinerary builder turns a few questions into a day-by-day plan, with a scheduler that respects drive times, intensity, sunrise and sunset timing, closures, and reservation lead times. Plans save to a My Trip hub you can edit, clone, and carry across devices.
Press or partnership inquiry? We are a small, family-run team and we read
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Hawaiʻi Weather Forecast
Today’s Weather Brief · Audio · ~45s
0:00
0:57
Read the transcript
Trade winds are strong right now, with high surf hitting the south shore today. Windward areas are seeing frequent showers through the weekend.
South-facing beaches have dangerous surf today through Sunday—stay out of the water unless you're an experienced swimmer. East-facing shores will build rough water by Sunday or Monday. The bigger picture is a tropical system, Fausto, heading our way. It's weakening but should arrive near the islands by Tuesday or Wednesday as a tropical storm or weaker system, bringing strong winds, rough seas, and heavy rain. The exact track is still uncertain, so check the forecast daily.
Get your beach time and water activities in today through early next week on the leeward side, where conditions stay calmer. Be ready to shift plans by midweek when conditions turn rough.
Created with AI from the official NWS forecast discussion · verify with NWS before heading out
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Temperature
Weather data by Open-Meteo.com
Current Time in Hawaiʻi
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