Ah yes, the operators: owners and management companies. Your comment might warrant a "part two" to this story.

You're correct that some smaller operators (mostly those who were primarily dependent on corporate business and couldn't ride out the work from home/meet from home era) did have to shutter.

And that's difficult, perhaps as difficult as it was on the 20.5 million American workers who were furloughed, laid off or fired in April 2020, as companies desperately attempted to right-size their work forces in the face of a once-in-a-lifetime health crisis, even as the stock prices of many of these same companies were already rallying on the back on a emergency rate cut that history may not treat kindly.

But in the two years and nine days from the time Hawaii announced its first restrictions to the time those restrictions were lifted for good, the stock prices of publicly-traded ownership groups in Wailea increased by an average of 127%. The publicly-traded management companies did nearly as well - up 124% on average from March 2020 to March 2022.

So the big guys who represent well over half the hotel/resort supply in the U.S. did fine, just as they did through the financial crisis a decade prior.