How this site makes decisions about what to include
Totally Hawaii is independently run. No hotels, tour operators, airlines, restaurants, or tourism boards pay to appear on the site, and no placement — including in our hotel reviews directory — is the result of a commercial arrangement. This page explains specifically how that works in practice.
Hotel and restaurant mentions
Properties mentioned in our hotels & resorts directory and individual reviews were selected because they're widely known, consistently referenced in independent travel writing, and represent a useful range of price points and island locations — not because anyone paid or asked to be included. We don't have affiliate relationships with booking platforms; no link on this site earns the site revenue when you click it.
External links
Where we link to external sources — the National Park Service, USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, Hawaiʻi Beach Safety, and similar — it's because those are the authoritative, current-data sources for things that change and that we can't reliably keep updated from a travel guide. We don't link to sites because they've asked or paid us to.
What we get wrong, and how to tell us
This site is researched carefully but is not infallible — hours change, policies change, volcanic conditions change, and a specific fact can go stale between when we write it and when you read it. We try to write in a way that points to live authoritative sources for anything time-sensitive, rather than a number that'll be wrong in six months. If you find something that's out of date or incorrect, tell us — corrections get applied promptly and directly, not buried in an update notice.
Use of AI assistance
Some of the research, drafting and structural organisation of this site has been assisted by AI tools. All content is reviewed, edited and verified by the humans running the site before publication. We mention this not because we think it changes the quality or accuracy standard you should hold us to — it doesn't — but because we think straightforward disclosure is the right approach.
Corrections policy
Factual corrections are made silently and promptly when we receive them or catch them ourselves. We don't run correction notices for minor factual updates; we do note significant changes in the News & Journal when they affect advice a reader may have already acted on.