A lot of people say that it’s hard to get a camping permit for the Kalalau Trail. But is that true? Can we elaborate with more concrete data?
In this article we’ll show the stats for October 2024, break down those numbers into bite-sized pieces, and try to answer this and other questions you might have.
Summary
First let’s bring a quick summary for the anxious readers out there. Feel free to deep dive into more information throughout this article:
- 23% availability of spots recorded
- We recommend you book your permit at least 47 days in advance
- 1299 cancellations of permits were found
- If you are looking to buy a camping permit, don't forget to check out our services for booking and monitoring to help you out
Breaking down the numbers
23% availability of spots for the Kalalau Trail
This is the most simple unit of measurement we can present. It simply counts the total number of spots available versus occupied for the Kalalu camping site The way it works is:
- There are a total of 60 spots available per day for the Kalalau camping site
- The booking time window is limited to 90 days
- Given the numbers above the camping capacity is 60 times 90, therefore 5,400 spots
- If we calculate 23% times 5,400 we'll get the average number of spots available
There you go, now you should be able to understand this initial measuring number. However, we won't stop here, there is much more to present in the following topics.
Availability per number of hikers and days
At this point we are going deeper into the statistics and it will get a bit more complicated, but we hope we can entertain you. For this metric we are measuring the number of days which we could observe availability of permits given specific conditions. The camping permits are available for purchase at most 90 days from today, so you can’t buy a permit 91 days in advance, this is a moving window of 90 days from the current day in the Hawaiian Standard Timezone (HST or GMT-10).
That being said, when we are looking at October 2024 stats we are in fact checking camping permit availability from 2024-10-01 to 2025-01-29. The latter date comes from the last day of October + 90 days.
Here’s what we are talking about:
- Always looking at 90-day windows for each day of October:
- From 2024-10-01 to 2024-12-30 (90 days)
- From 2024-10-02 to 2024-12-31 (90 days)
- And so on, until…
- From 2024-10-31 to 2025-01-29 (90 days)
We hope this clarifies the date cycles, but now let’s go back to availability numbers. It was recorded an average of 49% of days available, so 49% multiplied by 90 days gives us 44 days of availability (rounding down the number). Given the current numbers, our recommendation is to book your permit at least 47 days in advance so you don't risk missing out any available permits.
But wait, you might say “won’t these availability numbers change if I’m a solo hiker looking for a single night of camping, versus a group of 3 hikers looking for 4 nights?”.
Good point :), the answer is YES
However, in order to simplify the daily availability stats and show you a single understandable number we chose the scenario of 2 hikers looking after 2 nights of camping at Kalalau. Don't worry if you are not understanding yet. We'll expand in the next section and show you some tables that will probably help clarifying what's going on.
Breaking down availability per hiker vs nights of camping
Let’s take a look into the table below. As we can see we have two variables:
- The number of nights (consecutive nights)
- The number of hikers
When we combine both variables and options available for each, we get the table below:
|
Availability of days to book |
Number of nights |
|||||
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
||
|
Number of hikers |
1 |
53% |
50% |
50% |
49% |
47% |
|
2 |
50% |
49% |
48% |
48% |
45% |
|
|
3 |
49% |
47% |
47% |
46% |
43% |
|
|
4 |
48% |
47% |
46% |
46% |
42% |
|
Now we can clearly observe how availability changes as we have more hikers and/or more nights of camping at Kalalau. We should also emphasize that we are looking at consecutive nights only since you can’t break your camping permit into multiple permits.
Please don't confuse the availability of spots with availability of days. They are inherently different measurements. The availability of spots (the first metric we presented in this article) is simply looking into total number of spots available versus occupied. The availability of days is much more comprehensive given we are looking into availability from the prespective of number of consecutive days and hikers, but surely a more interesting number to evaluate since it's closer to the reality of folks searching for a camping permit.
At this point it should be clear to you where the 49% is coming from. We can also calculate the recommended amount of days that you should book in advance in order to secure the camping permit for Kalalau Trail and here’s the other table:
|
Days in advance required to book you spot |
Number of nights |
|||||
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
||
|
Number of hikers |
1 |
43 |
45 |
46 |
46 |
49 |
|
2 |
45 |
47 |
47 |
47 |
50 |
|
|
3 |
47 |
48 |
48 |
49 |
52 |
|
|
4 |
47 |
49 |
49 |
49 |
52 |
|
As we can see, even though it’s not hard to get a camping permit, it’s recommended to plan ahead of time so you can better choose the dates for your group.
Kalalau camping permit cancellations
Another way to buy a permit is when someone cancels their plans and their permit gets back to be available. This can happen any time of the day and night, so we track them to better understand how and when it's happening. For the month of October we were able to find 1299 cancellations. You can use these cancellations to your favor. We offer a monitoring service which will notify you if a cancellation is found in matching dates you have selected.
Keep in mind that we don't count abandoned carts as real cancellations, otherwise these numbers would be much higher. When a permit goes to a cart, if the user does not complete the payment process, eHawaii returns the occupied spot to the availability table after 30 minutes or so.
More in-depth stats: 15-day buckets
Now we go to some more interesting stats. Imagine you want to book your permit in the next 15 days, how likely is it for you to find availability? Let’s dive into the numbers right away!
Permit availability for the next 15 days
- 0% of spots available
- 1% of days with availability
- 60 cancellations recorded
|
Availability % |
Number of nights |
|||||
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
||
|
Number of hikers |
1 |
4% |
2% |
0% |
0% |
0% |
|
2 |
1% |
1% |
0% |
0% |
0% |
|
|
3 |
1% |
0% |
0% |
0% |
0% |
|
|
4 |
0% |
0% |
0% |
0% |
0% |
|
Permit availability from day 15 to 30
- 0% of spots available
- 1% of days with availability
- 147 cancellations recorded
|
Availability % |
Number of nights |
|||||
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
||
|
Number of hikers |
1 |
5% |
2% |
2% |
0% |
0% |
|
2 |
3% |
1% |
0% |
0% |
0% |
|
|
3 |
1% |
0% |
0% |
0% |
0% |
|
|
4 |
0% |
0% |
0% |
0% |
0% |
|
Permit availability from day 30 to 45
- 11% of spots available
- 27% of days with availability
- 161 cancellations recorded
|
Availability % |
Number of nights |
|||||
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
||
|
Number of hikers |
1 |
35% |
28% |
26% |
25% |
24% |
|
2 |
30% |
27% |
26% |
25% |
24% |
|
|
3 |
29% |
26% |
26% |
25% |
24% |
|
|
4 |
29% |
26% |
26% |
25% |
24% |
|
Permit availability from day 45 to 60
- 35% of spots available
- 83% of days with availability
- 276 cancellations recorded
|
Availability % |
Number of nights |
|||||
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
||
|
Number of hikers |
1 |
88% |
84% |
84% |
83% |
77% |
|
2 |
86% |
83% |
82% |
82% |
73% |
|
|
3 |
83% |
79% |
78% |
77% |
69% |
|
|
4 |
81% |
78% |
76% |
75% |
68% |
|
Permit availability from day 60 to 75
- 43% of spots available
- 89% of days with availability
- 226 cancellations recorded
|
Availability % |
Number of nights |
|||||
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
||
|
Number of hikers |
1 |
94% |
92% |
92% |
90% |
83% |
|
2 |
92% |
89% |
88% |
85% |
78% |
|
|
3 |
91% |
87% |
85% |
83% |
71% |
|
|
4 |
90% |
87% |
85% |
83% |
71% |
|
Permit availability from day 75 to 90
- 57% of spots available
- 96% of days with availability
- 429 cancellations recorded
|
Availability % |
Number of nights |
|||||
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
||
|
Number of hikers |
1 |
97% |
96% |
96% |
95% |
92% |
|
2 |
96% |
96% |
95% |
94% |
91% |
|
|
3 |
96% |
95% |
94% |
93% |
91% |
|
|
4 |
94% |
94% |
93% |
91% |
88% |
|
Is it easy to get the Kalalau camping permit this month?
Yes! It’s winter time, and during winter Kaua’i gets hammered with high surf and rain, making it much harder to hike the Kalalau Trail. Many times the State Park gets closed due to floods and risky weather. At the end, fewer people are looking into hiking an already dangerous trail in worse conditions.
So there is a seasonality component to the Kalalau camping permit. Summer months tend to get very competitive and hard to find permits. They are quickly sold out in a couple of minutes.
We hope this article helps you out on understanding a bit more of the availability numbers for this tough backpacking, but amazing trip. See you next month with another stats evaluation.
Mahalo!