One of the four daily San Francisco-Honolulu flights will be suspended April 6 to June 3, said Norman Reeder, United's managing director for Hawaii. He called it a seasonal adjustment.
The airline already has reduced some of its capacity on island routes by using airplanes with fewer seats, Reeder said today.
However United, which brings in about 30 percent of Hawaii's mainland tourists, has no plans to cut its long-term commitment to the islands.
"We have no plans to reduce the base schedule to Hawaii," except for the temporary suspension. "However, we are looking carefully at different alternatives and at this moment it (Hawaii) is not profitable," he said.
In an annual meeting with United executives at the airline's Chicago headquarters Tuesday, travel wholesalers were asked to do their bit to help make the business profitable, Reeder said.
One wholesaler at the meeting, Creative Leisure International President Peter Henze, said United executives told the wholesalers that the airline needs help boosting travel to Hawaii.
But he said that there are deeper issues affecting tourism beyond one airline's flight schedule.
"The state has been slow to act on the financial support for tourism," he said. "If Hawaii doesn't promote itself as a viable destination, there will be fewer people" coming in, he said.
Reeder said for now United is fine-tuning its operations to adjust for slower business.
For one, the airline is not using as many of its reconfigured 747s on the Hawaii routes as it was last fall, replacing them with lower-capacity aircraft, Reeder said. Some of the 450-seat aircraft, developed by removing the business class section and increasing economy seats, have been put on other routes.
The schedule hasn't changed but the number of seats varies month to month as the airline tries to match aircraft size with demand, Reeder said.
United made a significant increase in its Hawaii service last year.
It added two flights from Los Angeles to the neighbor islands and reconfigured some of its Boeing 747s into all-economy seating. The result was a capacity increase that allowed the airline to bring 4,500 more travelers to Hawaii each week.
United has four flights a day to Honolulu from Los Angeles, four from San Francisco and one from Chicago. It has two Kona flights a day, one from Los Angeles and one from San Francisco, and four flights a day from the West Coast to Maui.
"The fourth quarter was not good for Hawaii in total," Reeder said, and he noted that the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau recently predicted no growth in tourism through 1997. The HVCB reported a 1.7 percent decline in arrivals from the mainland in January, compared with January 1996, with California dragging 5.9 percent behind the year-earlier month.
Mainland arrivals have been declining since October, the HVCB said.