Peak season Dec–Apr · shoulder season pays off May–Jun & Sep–Oct 6 main islands · start with one, not four Hawaiʻi–Aleutian Time (HST) — no daylight saving, ever Currency: US Dollar — no exchange needed for US visitors Site journal: new pages added weekly
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NEWS · 01 News & journal

Welcome to Totally Hawaii

Why we're building an independent Hawaiʻi guide, in the open, one honest page at a time.

Why another Hawaiʻi site

Search "things to do in Maui" and you'll get either a thin, ad-heavy listicle written by someone who's never been, or a wall of text so long it stops being useful. We wanted something in between: real, specific, honestly-written pages — organized like a reference, not a feed — that we'd actually be happy to hand a friend before their first trip.

How we're building it

Totally Hawaii launched with 27 pages across eight departments: Plan, Stay, Islands, Do, Culture, Food, News and About. That was deliberately small. Rather than publishing two hundred thin pages on day one, we started with one properly-written page per core topic in each department, and we're adding new pages — at least weekly, often two or three times a week — from there.

Each department card on the homepage is a section that will keep growing without the site's structure ever needing to change: the Islands department will eventually cover every town and region, not just the highlights; the Do department will eventually list every beach and trailhead worth knowing about.

What's coming next

How we vet what we publish

See our vetting process for the specifics — short version: we'd rather publish fewer pages that are actually accurate and specific than more pages padded with generic travel-blog filler.

Thanks for reading this early. Follow the board for what's next.