However, nothing you say in your post has any bearing on that situation. You can buy a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon and carpool all you want, but that will not affect the number and cost of flights to Hawaii.
DVC Hawaii is an especially interesting case, because Hawaii grows almost none of its food. Virtually everything consumed there has been brought in by ship or plane. Given the rapidly increasing cost of getting those goods to the islands, how much spending money will be needed for a family to dine there at the proposed new DVC resort, compared with Florida?
Many people think the next 50 years is going to look like the past 50 years.... if only we wish hard enough and invent hard enough, it will be possible to do things more or less the way we've all got used to doing them during our lifetimes. I think that's naive, but, we'll see
Sorry, still not buying it.
Hawaii attracts nearly 10 million tourists per year. A resort with 800 rooms and an average length-of-stay of 7 nights (Hawaii average is closer to 10) needs to attract 41,000 families annually.
Assume an average family size of about 4 and Disney need only attract 1.5% of the current Hawaii visitor population to fill the resort year-round.
There has also been speculation that Hawaii will become a stop for the new
DCL ships under construction (Disney flirted with that concept several years back.) Even if the stop is just an afternoon layover, it will give Disney the opportunity to introduce hundreds of people to the resort each week, fill the restaurants, sell some souvenirs, etc.
Brian makes a good point about price increases in other segments of the economy. But these increases aren't going to materially alter how people live their lives. People on tight budgets will make adjustments, and most of those adjustments will be minor (more off-brands, dine in cheaper restaurants, increased bargain hunting, more economical vehicles, etc.) Those who still have enough disposable income won't change their spending patterns a bit.
Sure some people will be forced to reduce their recreational spending. But let's keep a little perspective on the Hawaii development--Disney is trying to capture only a tiny, tiny share of an already healthy vacation market. Their name alone will go a long way toward making that happen.
Hawaii also appears to be a fairly resilient vacation destination. While tourism dropped sharply immediately following the 9.11.01 attack, by the summer of 2002 tourism was back to within 1% of its prior year numbers. 2002 still represented a period of economic uncertainty, rising gas prices, terror alerts and so on. By comparison, Walt Disney World took MUCH longer to recover from 9.11.
