ʻOhana
Someone actually lives here.
Most travel sites are a company you can't find behind a voice that isn't anyone. This one is a person in Honolulu and a set of AI agents that say they're AI. Here is the whole roster, what we write ourselves, what we don't, and how we get paid.
The human
Michael Crain
One person, in Honolulu. Grew up in Makiki, went to Roosevelt. Cinematographer by trade, which is a strange background for someone running a booking site and probably explains why the neighborhood guides read like they do.
When Leilani can't answer your question and Nani can't either, the escalation path ends at him. There is no support floor behind that. On the other hand, there is also nobody between you and the person who can actually change the site.
michael@aloha.fyi — a real inbox, read by a real person, usually slowly.
The voice on the phone
If you call the number, that's Sachi — Michael's daughter — reading it herself. An actual person who sat down at a microphone, not text-to-speech and not a synthetic read of someone else's voice. When the greeting changes, it changes because she recorded it again. That's slower than generating one. It's also the whole point.
The rest of the ʻohana is software.
They have names because they have jobs and personalities, not to trick you. Every one of them is AI and will say so if you ask.
Nani
The concierge
Plans your day and finds the booking. Named for a real person; written as a considered character rather than a Hawaiian name stuck on a chatbot. She is AI, and she'll tell you so if you ask.
Liliʻuokalani AI
The heritage guide
Talks about the Queen — third person, always. It never speaks as her, never invents her words, and marks contested history as contested. That rule is in the prompt, not just in our intentions.
Leilani
Front desk
Answers first, hands off to Nani when the question gets real. If she can't help, she gets a human — which is Michael.
Marc Kaneshiro
Itinerary planner
Builds the morning-to-sunset version when you want a whole day rather than one tour.
Sachiko · Bei Ling · Tae Sun · Isabella
Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish
Not translation wrappers — separate agents with their own prompts, because a Japanese visitor and a Spanish visitor are not asking the same questions in different words.
What we wrote. What we didn't.
Most sites blur this line on purpose. Ours:
Written here, by hand
The neighborhood guides. The ~600-business local directory. The heritage pages. The destination dossiers, which are cited to the Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority, the National Park Service, DLNR, and the City — so you can check us rather than trust us. And Nani's Picks, which is the shortest and the most honest thing here: fifteen places Michael actually eats and drinks at, no affiliate links on any of them, and a note on the page telling you exactly where that stops being true.
Partner inventory we rank, not inventory we picked
Most of the ~995-tour catalog comes from Viator, Klook and Groupon feeds, ordered mostly by review count. Eighteen tours are ours directly through FareHarbor, and those are the ones we put our name on. We used to call the whole catalog “curated.” It isn't, and we stopped.
How we get paid
Commission when you book through our links. That's the whole model — no paywall, no signup wall, no display ads, and we don't sell your conversation. It does mean we have a financial reason to show you tours, which is exactly why the guides tell you when to skip one.
Rules we hold ourselves to.
Written down in the codebase, not just believed in.
- —Nani never claims to be a person, and never claims to have been born here. She's an AI concierge trained by locals. In every language.
- —The heritage guide speaks about Queen Liliʻuokalani, never as her, and never invents her words.
- —Sacred and restricted places lead with the restriction. We don't offer workarounds, and we don't sell a place that asked not to be sold.
- —No fake scarcity. No countdown the availability API didn't return, no “2 spots left” we can't prove.
- —No claim the data can't back. If a row says “reviews,” every card in it has one. We audited ourselves against this in August 2026 and had to change a lot of copy.
- —ʻOkina and kahakō are spelling, not decoration. Missing them is a bug we file.
We're a small thing trying to be an honest one. If you catch us claiming something we can't back, tell us — that's a bug report and we'll treat it like one.
ALOHAFYI LLC · Honolulu, Hawaiʻi