How do you plan a visit to Pearl Harbor from Honolulu?

The short answer

Pearl Harbor lies west of Honolulu's airport, and its memorials are run by the National Park Service as the Pearl Harbor National Memorial. The visitor center is free, but the boat program to the USS Arizona Memorial, the reason most people come, is reserved in advance through the federal Recreation.gov site; a few standby tickets are given out on the day. No bags are allowed. Plan a morning for it, get there by car, tour, bus or the new Skyline rail line, and give it the time and quiet a war grave deserves.

It is a day trip rather than part of the city on this site; see day trips for the rest of the island.

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A car for the drive west, and somewhere to leave the bags the memorial will not allow.

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What happened here

On 7 December 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. More than 2,400 Americans were killed and twelve ships were sunk, and the attack brought the United States into the Second World War. The harbor remains a major naval base today, the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet.

The battleship USS Arizona exploded and sank during the attack. Of the 1,177 sailors and Marines killed aboard her, 1,102 are still inside the hull, which lies where it sank. That is what the memorial marks.

What the memorial includes

The Pearl Harbor National Memorial, made a separate unit of the National Park System in 2019, includes the USS Arizona Memorial, the memorials to the USS Utah and the USS Oklahoma, six officers' bungalows on Ford Island and the mooring quays of Battleship Row. The visitor center at Hālawa Landing has galleries on the war in the Pacific, a theater that shows a film about the attack, and memorial sculpture.

The USS Arizona Memorial itself was built in 1962 to a design by Alfred Preis, an Austrian-born architect living in Hawaiʻi. It is reached only by boat, and it straddles the sunken hull without touching it. More than two million people visit it every year.

Nearby, and run separately with their own tickets, are the battleship Missouri, the submarine museum of the USS Bowfin, and the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum on Ford Island.

The memorial itself

Alfred Preis, who designed the memorial, had been detained at Sand Island at the start of the war because of his Austrian birth. The Navy asked for a bridge floating above the ship that could hold two hundred people, and Preis gave it a shape that sags in the middle and rises at the ends; he said it expressed initial defeat and ultimate victory.

It has three parts: the entry, an assembly room open to the air, and at the far end the shrine, a marble wall bearing the names of everyone killed aboard. The flag flies from a pole attached to the severed mainmast of the sunken ship. Guides say the twenty-one openings in the walls were not meant as a symbol, whatever you may hear.

Some survivors of the attack chose to have their ashes placed inside the wreck to rest with their shipmates. The last survivor of the Arizona, Lou Conter, died in 2024 at the age of 102.

Reserving the boat program

The program to the Arizona Memorial begins with the film and continues by boat across the harbor to the memorial; programs run at intervals through the day until mid-afternoon. Reserve it on Recreation.gov as soon as you know your date; a small booking fee applies, and the Park Service strongly recommends booking ahead because standby tickets are limited. Bring your confirmation.

Check the Park Service's own page the day before for any change to the programs, and see booking ahead for the other places in and around the city that need a reservation.

The bag rule

Bags are not allowed in the memorial or the visitor center, and that includes backpacks, purses and camera bags. You can carry a phone, a wallet and a camera without a bag. A storage facility near the entrance holds bags for a fee. The simplest plan is to leave your bag at your hotel and bring only what fits in your pockets.

Planning the rest of the day

The battleship Missouri is moored on Ford Island, bow toward the Arizona, placed well back so that it would not overshadow the memorial; it and the aviation museum are reached by a shuttle bus to the island, which cannot be visited on your own. If you want to see them as well, allow most of a day, and book each separately.

The visitor center's galleries, film and grounds are worth your time on their own. Arrive early, before the day's heat and crowds, and bring water and sun protection for the waiting area along the shore.

Getting there without a car

By car it is a drive west past the airport. Without a car, there are three choices. Tours from Waikīkī include transport and are the easiest option. TheBus serves the area from the city; check the current route before you go. And since October 2025 the Skyline rail line has run past Pearl Harbor and the airport, so from the airport or from its eastern end at Middle Street in Kalihi you can ride to the station nearest the memorial and walk or take a short bus from there.

From Waikīkī, Skyline is not yet the easy option, because the line does not reach the city center before 2031. Do you need a car in Honolulu? weighs the choices, and getting from the airport to Waikīkī explains the rail line's reach.

How to visit

This is a war grave. On the memorial, speak quietly, keep children close, and dress as you would for a cemetery. Visitors toss flowers into the water through an opening in the memorial; lei are no longer thrown in, because their string harms sea life, and are laid instead on the rail in front of the names of the dead. Oil still seeps from the ship to the surface, and is sometimes called the tears of the Arizona. It is not a place for posed photographs.

Plan a gentle afternoon afterward. Many people go on to Punchbowl, the national cemetery in the crater above downtown Honolulu, where many of the Pacific war dead are buried, or to the older history of the islands downtown, told in what happened to the Hawaiian Kingdom.