FAQ - Kalalau trail permit and others
Are you the official seller of Kalalau permits?
No. The only official seller is DLNR (Department of Land and Natural Resources) through their eHawaii website. We are only assisting hikers in finding and booking their permits. Hikers can do it on their own through eHawaii, but if they are having a hard time to secure a permit we are here to help.
Do I really need to buy this booking service or can I do it by myself?
For sure you can do it by yourself (or with help from family and friends) and we highly encourage you to try, lots of people do. This is a convenience for folks that don't want the hassle + time consuming of the booking process, which can be very hard over the summer/dry months. If you try and fail, you might consider us for the next attempt ;)
On the other hand, for the monitoring of cancellations, we highly encourage you to use our services. How would you keep checking for cancellations in every 5 minutes for many days in a row? We are here to solve you this issue with a very low cost. Check our service that monitors the dates you are aiming for.
Does the kalalau trail booking service includes the parking permit or shuttle tickets?
No. The parking/transport should be handled by you once your permit is secured. At this point we have no intention in offering this service since it's easily achievable by you via https://gohaena.com/ (the camping permit itself is the very hard one, which is our focus for now).
If you are also finding hard to get the parking permit or shuttle, don't hesitate to contact Kevin Schwoebel since he offers transportation services. Call or text to (973) 769-8854. You can also email him at criticaltoys@gmail.com. He also offers storage for your luggage, planning for the hike, gear rental, and lots of experience of Kaua'i, Kalalau, and the local community.
My planned dates are already sold out on eHawaii website, what can I do?
We also offer another service that monitors the dates you are aiming for. In summary, eHawaii restore available spots as people cancel their permits, and this can happen any time of the day. Our monitors will send you an email if one of your target dates becomes available.
I don't see anywhere the options to choose the check-in/out dates. How are you getting that information from me?
Once your order gets placed, we'll reach out via email to collect all the required information for the chosen service. Only after that we will request payment, so no worries, you won't be charged when you place an order.
What methods of payment do you accept?
For now, PayPal and INTERACT e-Transfer (Canada) only. We'll send you the payment details once your order is placed.
What is your success rate at booking permits?
We are a new niche business with very few customers so far, so stats here won't matter much, but if you really want to know the results, 100% success rate (in a couple of cases we could not get the permit on the first attempt, but we got on the second try). In the coming months/years we'll observe how this metric moves as our customer base grows.
How can you ensure fairness between different customers?
That's a great question! We want to ensure fairness not only with our customers, but everyone else around the world trying to book these permits.
How do we ensure that, you might ask: we only run the booking service for one customer per night.
That being said, if you place an order for a permit booking, but we already have another booking scheduled for the same check-in date, we'll cancel your order with this explanation (or suggest you another check-in date).
We are a small business in a niche market and we want to stay that way. We also want to ensure that everyone sharing the same limited resources get their chance too. We are not hypocrites though, we offer a service for those that don't want to deal with all these complexities and annoyances from this permit process, so we crafted a nice service for those willing to pay a premium for that. Last but not least, getting the permit is very hard. We go through the same process as everyone else, due to that, if we cannot focus on one customer at a time we won't be able to serve you well and our success rate will likely drop, so "quality over quantity" is one of our mottos here.
If you want to only focus on the hike and your training, and you have some extra cash to spend, we are biased on this recommendation of course, but the reality is that we were made for you :)
Are you reselling permits? Why offering this booking service at first place?
First of all we must highlight that we encourage everyone to try to book permits on their own, and only after that, reach out to us. You should experience on your own how complicated and frustrating the current process can be before spending extra money with our services.
We are on the same boat. We've been to Kalalau before and experienced all these issues with the booking process multiple times. As a response, we proudly designed something to fill in the gaps of the current process, especially focusing on the people that are stuck trying on their own.
We are not reselling permits (permit "scalping"). There is no way for anyone to get a permit and re-sell to someone else on Kalalau. A very nice feature created by the permit provider (DLNR + Tyler Technologies) is that permits are not transferable, as they are issued under the permittee name and their ID is checked. That being said, there is no reselling of permits.
Not everyone is tech savvy, or fast typer, or has a speedy Internet, or able to wake up at midnight Hawai'i time multiple days to try to get a Kalalau permit. The current process puts all these people away from being able to get a permit on high demand months. Hikers and adventurers should be focusing on their training and adventure, but instead they find themselves inside this whole hassle on acquiring the permit. Is that how you would want to start your Kalalau experience?
The services provided by us are simply a natural response to something that does not work right or effectively enough (sorry about the philosophic paragraph, but we should think about this). That's the organic process of human evolution and what brought us to the bright screen you are looking at right now, reading this FAQ from somewhere around planet earth. We must be cognizant of that and embrace the status quo change. Humans get dissatisfied with something and create something better, and that spiral goes on and on, all aiming to improve our lives somehow.
Closing this topic, clearly the current process is outdated and insufficient for the existing demand of users. There are better proven ways to tackle this issue. One of them, which is already in place, is ensuring that permits are not transferable, but there is more to be done.
The permit provider can easily solve everything on their end. All they have to do is two simple features for the whole community and adventure tourists:
- Lottery system. No more midnight permits, no more selective exclusion of "slow" users. All we need is a sign-up form with the desired dates and the random lottery selecting the lucky ones.
- Email sign-up for cancellations. Same as our GoKalalau's monitoring service, but implemented at the source. If there is a cancellation on your desired dates, DLNR would send you an email, and done.
With that, GoKalalau and any other businesses trying to improve people's life on this particular matter would not have a reason to exist given the provider would solve the observed issues of the community.
This is a big answer, so thank you for taking the time and reading it. We hope this can influence real change and improvements for the community. Mahalo :)
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Please feel free to contact us if you could not find your answers in this list :)