Our thanks to Aaron J. Salā, President & CEO of the Hawai’i Visitors and Convention Bureau, for his beautiful opening remarks to begin SITE Classic 2025 in Maui.
He has generously shared them here again with us, so that the wider SITE community can get a sample of what was shared in the room together at this year’s event.
Aloha mai kākou.
We are gathered here in Kapalua, overlooking Honokahua — a bay whose sands hold centuries of story.
For generations, families here grew kalo in terraced lo‘i, fished from the reef, and drank from the freshwater springs that rise up through the sand. The land and the sea sustained them, and their bones — their iwi kūpuna — were laid to rest in the dunes, so that their lineage would remain tied to this place forever.
In the 19th century, this land became ranch country under the Baldwins. By the early 20th century, it was covered in pineapple fields under D.T. Fleming and Maui Land & Pineapple. By the 1970s, ranch and plantation gave way to resort development, beginning with the Kapalua Bay Hotel.
And in 1987, as construction began for this very Ritz-Carlton, the bulldozers struck what lay just beneath the surface: the remains of more than a thousand ancestors.
Hawai‘i rose up in protest. Vigils were held at the Capitol. And out of that struggle came a decision that changed this place and this state: the hotel would be moved inland, and Honokahua would become a preservation site. The iwi kūpuna were reinterred, and new laws were written to protect burials across Hawai‘i.
That story is not separate from where we sit this morning. This hotel stands as a monument to that decision — that dignity could prevail over convenience, that memory could prevail over forgetting.
I share this history because every place has a genealogy. A mo‘okū‘auhau.
To know a place is to know its lineage: the people, the labors, the joys, the losses, the decisions that shaped it. When we remember that lineage and speak it out loud, we give life back to it. That is regeneration.
And so what does that mean for us, gathered here for SITE Classic? Incentive travel is a business. It motivates, it rewards, it sustains industries. But it also has the power to do more.
When our work honors the genealogy of place, it moves from transaction to transformation. It changes not just where people go, but who they become.
My hope is that the story of Honokahua stays with you. That it reminds you to look beneath the surface of every place you gather — to ask what lineages are present, what stories want to be told. And to know that in telling them, you participate in their renewal.
Because regeneration is not the destination. It is the pathway. The goal is that we remember who we are. That we live in right relationship — with the land, with each other, with those who came before and those who will come after.
If you carry Honokahua with you — if you let its story change the way you see your own home, your own work, your own responsibility — then this gathering will have mattered.
Because the true measure of what we do is not in the trips we plan or the numbers we move. It is in the lives we change, and in the places that endure because we chose to remember.
That is why we are here. That is the legacy we leave. That is the real incentive.
Mahalo nui. Aloha.
