About Access Honolulu

What this site is

Eighteen sights in Honolulu, one page each, and eleven sections on how the city works: arriving at an airport ten miles from Waikīkī, getting around by TheBus and on foot, the ocean and its warning signs, the history of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the seasons, what to eat and where to stay. There is also a journal of longer answers to the questions visitors ask most.

Every page tries to answer what a visitor actually needs: what a place is, what you see when you get there, how to visit it, what to combine it with, and where a well-known story is a tradition rather than a fact.

It is not a listings site. There are no opening hours, admission prices or fares anywhere on it, because those change, and the operator is the only source that is right on the day you travel.

What “Honolulu” means here

The City and County of Honolulu governs the whole island of Oʻahu, so the name is used for places far from the city. This site draws a line: the city is the south shore from Kalihi to Kāhala and the valleys behind it, up to the Koʻolau ridge. Pearl Harbor, Hanauma Bay, the windward coast and the North Shore are day trips, and they appear on the day trips page rather than as sights of the city.

How it is written

Each page is built from sources that are named at the foot of it, and the facts in it, such as dates, heights, distances and who built what, are checked against those sources before the page is published. Where the sources disagree, the page says so or gives the safer figure.

Some of the history here is contested. The overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 is told from the historical record and from the findings of the United States government, including its apology of 1993, plainly and without softening. Hawaiian names are written with their ʻokina and macrons: Waikīkī, Hawaiʻi, Oʻahu.

Access Honolulu is written and maintained with the assistance of AI, edited and fact-checked before publication. Anything wrong is worth pointing out, and will be corrected.

The photographs

Every photograph comes from Wikimedia Commons and is credited on the page it appears on, with the photographer's name, the license and a link to the file.

They are chosen by looking at them: recent rather than archival, showing the place the page is about, and captioned from what is actually in the frame. Many files labeled Honolulu show other parts of the island or other islands, so each one is checked before it is used. Graves, sacred places and sacred objects are not pictured on this site, and neither are Hawaiian cultural patterns used as decoration.

What it costs you

Nothing. A few planning pages carry affiliate links, marked as such before the first one, and the privacy page explains what that means. No page about a sight carries one, and nothing on this site is recommended because of a commission.