Island Hopping From the Big Island (hotel, prices, airport)

[alidoremi]

We purchased a tour package for the Big Island for one week. All of our hotel stays will be in Kona. I've heard that you can island hop by plane pretty inexpensively. Is it possible to do a day trip to another island and then back again to Kona that evening? Since our hotel is already paid for as part of our package we don't want the pay to stay overnight on another island. Or should we?

[Balad1]

If this is your first visit to the Big Island then spend all your time there.

It would take weeks to do the island justice; save the other islands for another trip.

[hotzcatz]

The planes usually all go to Oahu before going on to another island, so if you were going to choose another island, Oahu would probably be the one. You could fly over in the morning, get a car for one day and see some things on Oahu and then catch a flight back to the Big Island in the evening. Check Go and Hawaiian Air for prices. There's also Mokulele and Pacific Wings if you want smaller airplanes. There might be a small plane that goes between Kona and Maui, check Pacific Wings and Mokulele.

[Alohikea]

I second the notion of just staying on the BI-there is so much to do that your week there would be packed.

[meadowNC]

Originally Posted by hotzcatz

The planes usually all go to Oahu before going on to another island, so if you were going to choose another island, Oahu would probably be the one. You could fly over in the morning, get a car for one day and see some things on Oahu and then catch a flight back to the Big Island in the evening. Check Go and Hawaiian Air for prices. There's also Mokulele and Pacific Wings if you want smaller airplanes. There might be a small plane that goes between Kona and Maui, check Pacific Wings and Mokulele.

This is exactly what we did and it worked out well... However, it took being super-organized (mapping out EXACTLY what we wanted to see in Oahu) and flexible (traffic delays caused us to abort our last planned site to visit and head for the airport).

I do agree with others that there are plenty of other activities to keep you busy on the BI for a week (heck, even for a month!), but if you are in Hawaii as a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and you feel you really must see XYZ on another island (for us, it was Pearl Harbor), then go for it. It was really easy to fly out and back into Kona in the same day.

[Galactastica]

Big Island is huge and really is like a conglomerate of all the other islands combined. YOu'll love it so much you'll want to come back and devote a whole other trip to one of the smaller islands-1 day just won't do it justice. If you really, really want to, do it, just consider it first. even the 1-2 our flight/airport time can put a damper on the time you could be spending doing something on BI. I took a whirl wind trip to O'ahu from BI once, left sat afternoon and came back sunday night. even that felt rushed, though it was a little over a day. (i went to see as many of the sets of Lost as i could, not a typical vacation haha)