Hawaii vacation news: Pearl Harbor ticketing changes, Maui begins 2nd test for arrivals, car rentals still scarce and expensive

– Starting today, May 3rd, at 3pm HST, the primary reservation booking window for USS Arizona Memorial tickets will expand from one week to eight weeks in advance. The secondary reservation booking window, which is one day in advance, will remain the same. Reservations can be booked at this recreation.gov link. For more information about these changes, see this link to the park’s Facebook announcement. Additionally, check out our updated tips for visiting the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.

– Beginning May 4th, trans-Pacific travelers to Maui County will be required to take a rapid COVID test upon arrival. Travelers who are full vaccinated are exempt from this new post-arrival test. See more details about visiting Maui here.

– Rental cars continue to be very expensive and difficult to find in Hawaii. From our recent quick research, we found daily rates ranging anywhere from about $100 to over $250 per day. Yes, per day! As KHON2 reports some tourists are even renting U-Haul trucks to explore the islands.

– The Waikiki sand replenishment project is scheduled to finish this month. For roughly the next three weeks, there will be partial beach closures from 6am to 6pm with a lot of big equipment moving sand. We first shared information about this project in January. As we said then, if you plan to visit Waikiki while this project is active but want to minimize this disruption, our advice would be to stay at the Hilton Hawaiian Village (see our review), which is situated quite far from the project activity. The recently refurbished and reopened Outrigger Reef

is a good distance away from the activity. Another good choice would be to stay at the Kahala Resort (see our review), which is about 10 minutes away, but easy to access the restaurants and shops of Waikiki.

– If you like watching TV series that are set in Hawaii, you’ll be glad to know that CBS announced NCIS Hawaii is planned for the 2021-2022 broadcast season.