I agree that a lot of profit flows offshore and that comes down, primarily, to hotels and retail stores (mostly the high-end, fashion type stores). It seems unlikely that Hawaii is going to replicate the demand for brands like Gucci, Prada, etc so that leaves lodging. Short term rentals are a way to keep money circulating in the local economy but that was dealt a heavy blow last August which did nothing but favor the hotel lobby and strengthen their position. I'm not sure where you stand on it, but I saw a lot of the same "anti-tourist" voices complaining about short term rentals, so round and round we go. The hotel lobby won and even more money now funnels straight to them and offshore as you said. If you want to break the back of that lobby, more voices are needed in favor of decentralizing lodging.
Or you could just flat out restrict the number of visitors and keep it all smaller as you said. You are still looking at a massive loss of jobs. It sounds like you're saying that, by keeping the spending local, it will offset. Even using the most aggressive local multiplier in any economic model, you would not come even close to replacing what was lost. You'd also lose a huge check of the tax revenue from that volume of tourists (25% of the general fund comes from tourists) so either expect services to drop and/or taxes to skyrocket and that's all before adding in the loss due to the high unemployment. It would be crippling to the state and everyone here. I know many business owners think they have nothing to do with tourism, but many of your customers may rely on that money for their income. The house painter doesn't get hired if the hotel worker loses their job and has no money to pay for house painting, for example.
So you would have to replace a huge portion of the economy with something else, but that's a pipe dream. You're talking about a government-coordinated effort to attract a whole industry to sprout up or move to Hawaii and that's just not remotely feasible.
I'm glad you agree we need to start opening this economy back up.
There is no argument as to the decision to reopen Hawaii's economy. We need to restart business activity as soon as we can. However, such a reopening had its own problems.
First and foremost is the ongoing pandemic of Covid-19, insufficient availability of testing kits, absence of a safe and reliable vaccine, and the lack of credible information of that virus to establish uniform protocols of prevention and treatment. Until these Covid-19 related issues are reasonably addressed, global consumer confidence will be low; thus, influencing peoples choices to spend and corporations decision to invest. Especially in any tourist or non-tourist dominant economy, even if you open for business right now, there just isn't much discretionary income out there, since many have lost their employment due to the Covid-19 shutdown orders. Hawaii's official economy is run by an oligarchic bunch of ultrawealthy that predominantly compromise the tourism, construction, and real estate sectors, whose soft power is clearly seen by the laws passed by the local government that always favor their interests and not the common people. For example, notice how construction was listed as an essential business not effected by the shutdown.
In addition to focusing on tourism, I advocate Hawaii looking at the other major industries in the islands to see whether a complete revamping is in order. For example, Hawaii is an ideal place to grow food and there already exists a number of people who operate in diversified agriculture. Despite the number and revenue generated, however, Hawaii is still dependent on food shipped from the continental US and from Asia. Clearly, something is wrong here and now is a good time for the government and residents to flirt with creative ideas to further expand the agriculture sector, especially when contemplating possible food shortages due to Covid-19.
Another area that many people often brag and overstate is the importance of Hawaii's military spending. Other than contributing to such items like the rental home industry and employing some island residents on its bases, its economic contribution to Hawaii in relation to the amount of land and water it uses is not economically efficient. Moreover, according to the US Small Business Association's Office of Advocacy, Hawaii has not been able to collect much general excise tax revenues because many subcontracted businesses operating in Hawaii's military bases are out-of-state entities that are able to avoid Hawaii's GET in the calculation of their costs (
https://advocacy.sba.gov/2019/08/19/hawaiis-general-excise-tax-puts-local-small-business-at-a-disadvantage/) . This leads to many local small businesses unable to win federal contracts, whose earned profits would stay circulated in Hawaii, rather than be exported somewhere else. I advocate the closure of many military assets in Hawaii to be redeveloped for commercial use that will in effect create more opportunities for middle class jobs as well as residential use for more affordable housing.