What was your very first job, and what did it teach you about people?
My very first job was at McDonald’s, and I still think about the training I received there today. The systems, the standards, the focus on consistency, and the guest experience were more rigorous than most people give it credit for. It shaped how I think about service at a very basic level.
From there I worked in a department store, which added something different: learning to read people, anticipate what they needed, and connect with strangers from all walks of life. I didn’t realize then that it was all building a foundation I would carry through my entire career.
Even before McDonald’s, I helped out at a travel agency, more of a childhood fascination than a formal job but it planted the seed. Those early experiences taught me how to show up for people. Everything since has been following where that curiosity led.
When did you realize hospitality was your calling, not just your career?
I’m not sure there was one single moment. It was more of a gradual recognition that everything I kept gravitating toward had hospitality at its center. From helping out at a travel agency as a kid, to a genuine lifelong passion for commercial aviation, to working at US Airways, to destination research in Washington D.C., and now here in Honolulu at HVCB.
At each step I thought I was just following the next interesting opportunity. But looking back, the common thread was always the same: curiosity about people and what moves them, and a real desire to be useful to them. I think for some people hospitality is a job they choose. For me it feels more like something that chose me.
How has living in Hawaiʻi influenced the way you serve others?
Living here changes your perspective in ways that are hard to fully explain until you experience it. This is not an abstract market or a data set. It is someone’s home. The residents of these islands live alongside this industry every single day, and that is not something I take lightly.
What a lot of people outside the industry do not fully appreciate is that visitor spending generates real tax revenue through mechanisms like the Transient Accommodations Tax that get reinvested directly back into the state. Into infrastructure, into schools, into the communities that make Hawaiʻi worth visiting in the first place. That context keeps me honest. When I am building a demand forecast or working on air service strategy, I am not just thinking about arrivals. I am thinking about the full picture, and the people who call these islands home.
What misconception do people have about your role?
Most people hear “market insights and air service development” and picture someone far removed from the actual guest experience, buried in spreadsheets while the real hospitality work happens somewhere else. I understand why it looks that way from the outside. But the way I see it, my work sits at the very beginning of the visitor journey.
If the air service is not there, if the route does not pencil out, if the seat capacity disappears, the experience never starts. No flight means no arrival. No arrival means no memory made, no family vacation, no reason for any of the rest of it. The empathy I developed early on at the counter—on the sales floor, at that travel agency as a kid—is still what makes the analytical work feel meaningful to me. The numbers tell you what is happening. Caring about people is what tells you why it matters.
When all is said and done, what do you hope people remember about the way you made them feel?
I hope they feel like they were actually heard. That sounds simple but I do not think it always is, especially in environments where there is pressure to have the answer, to move fast, to project confidence. Whether I am sitting across from an airline partner, HVCB member, briefing a government official, or working through something difficult with a colleague, I want people to leave the conversation feeling that their concern was taken seriously.
I also hope to be remembered as someone who told the truth even when the news was complicated. The data does not always say what people want to hear, and I have learned over a long career that being honest and being kind are not mutually exclusive. That is what good hospitality does, too. It holds people well, even when things are hard.
