So Hawaiirama blogger / contributor and most excellent Hawaii-based travel agent Bruce Fisher was right. A while back he posted a story on his blog about NCL pulling all of its boats out of Hawaii. NCL said no, we retracted the post, and I felt kinda dumb. Bruce had just sorta sensed that something wasn't right. It had rather suddenly become ridiculously hard to book passages on NCL boats -- harder than it should have been even if there had been two. The summer of 2008 appeared to be a huge bottleneck. And so it turned out Bruce was half-right and may still be proven completely correct.

NCL announced today that it would be pulling another cruise boat out of the islands, leaving cruisers hanging and leaving the Hawaii visitor industry flabbergasted. The departure of the second boat is all but an admission of defeat. NCL had made a huge investment in Hawaii, building a boat, refitting two others, buying a tour bus company and several local visitor activity operations, among other things. But running American flagged vessles with American crews in the islands simply proved uneconomical. Ironically, due to a pending rule change on foreign flagged vessels cruising in Hawaii, Pride of America, the last remaining NCL boat, could soon have en effective monopoly on island cruising. This would, of course, be great for NCL. And, I think, it would actually be great for Hawaii. Fewer visitors, higher prices, I say. Backpackers can always figure out a cheap way to schlep around the islands. Get rid of the big lower-middle tier of tourists and send us more Gucci clad big spenders. For those of you planning to do a Hawaii cruise, better hurry up before prices start to climb.

—Alex, 02/11/08