Cheap Flights to Honolulu

Welcome to Honolulu – grab a lei and a Mai Tai and settle into a relaxing vacation on the shores of O’ahu. Hawaii’s capital city is the centre of the island’s tourism and financial growth, but there’s more to this city than luau’s and the hula.

Surfers dream of flights to Honolulu for a chance to catch the waves off Waikiki Beach. Considered to be one of the world’s most beautiful beaches, Waikiki attracts about four million visitors each year. Along with swimming, surfing and sunbathing, weekend beachgoers can enjoy Sunset on the Beach, a free movie shown on a nine-metre screen. Geologists book Honolulu flights armed with cameras and notebooks to explore the extinct famous volcano, Diamond Head, and take a look at authentic Polynesian artifacts.  Families and friends find cheap flights to Hawaii for an island-getaway that rivals most U.S. beach destination spots.   

Away from the beach, the city is home to the Bishop Museum, Hawaii’s largest museum, founded in 1889 in honour of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the last descendant of the royal Kamehameha family. The Honolulu Academy of Arts boasts more than 50,000 works, and the Lyon Arboretum is an 80-hectare botanical garden, the only university botanical garden located in a tropical rain forest in the U.S.

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Honolulu climate

Book flights to Honolulu any time you want. The year-round temperature typically ranges from about 20 to 30 degrees (Celsius).There are two seasons — dry and rainy. The rainy season runs from November to March and the dry season is the rest of the year. June to November is the time for hurricanes.

When is the best time to fly to Honolulu?

Peak Season

Flights to Honolulu are pricey and the resorts are fully booked from mid-December through March and April. The last two weeks of December are particularly busy in O’ahu. The summer school vacation brings a lot of families to O’ahu, but you can get better deals on Honolulu vacation packages and flights to Honolulu than in winter.

Off Season

The best time to find cheap flights to Honolulu are in the spring and fall, mid-April to mid-June and September to mid-December. However, if you’re coming in the spring, book your Honolulu flights and hotels early as the last week in April is Japan’s Golden Week (four national holidays in one week), and the islands are very busy with Japanese visitors.

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Getting around Honolulu

You can cover most of Honolulu and O’ahu using TheBus. The Waikiki Trolley that stops at attractions in Waikiki and downtown Honolulu, with the driver providing commentary along the way. Few places on O’ahu are more than an hour’s drive from Honolulu. Car rental prices tend to be reasonable and gasoline prices high. However, traffic is heavy; there are approximately 400 cars for every mile of road on O’ahu.   

Honolulu airport overview

As the main gateway to Hawaii, Honolulu International Airport (HNL) is one of the busiest airports in the United States, with 21 million travellers passing through it each year. The airport is busy with old-fashioned terminal buildings that haven’t changed much since they were built in the 1960s.

There are three terminals at Honolulu Airport, and as the airport is not as well-signed as it could be, transferring between them can be very confusing. The Commuter Terminal and the Interisland Terminal serve smaller regional airlines. The Interisland Terminal also sees some flights to and from the US mainland and Hawaiian Airlines’ international flights. The Overseas Terminal, also called the International Terminal, serves all other international arrivals and departures.

The city of Honolulu, about five miles (8km) from the airport, has more than 1 million inhabitants and is as bustling as any major city. Although you might want to go further afield for that remote-island holiday, it’s a warm and hospitable first experience of Hawaii.