U.S. airlines adding Maui flights to help residents, visitors flee

August 14, 2023

Major U.S. carriers are adding flights to help passengers flee Maui as one of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history continues to decimate parts of the island, reports Fox Business.

A spokesperson for Hawaiian Airlines told Fox Business that it wasextending its operations on Thursday, August 10, with six additional flights to Honolulu from Kahului to help evacuate travelers affected by the brush fires on Maui. The fires were driven by fierce winds from a hurricane and have already killed at least 36 people.

Officials in Hawaii warned Thursday that the death toll could rise—with the fires still burning and teams spreading out to search charred areas.

Hawaii already added nine extra flights on Wednesday between Honolulu and Kahului to accommodate departures out of Maui, in addition to supporting emergency response efforts.

“The safety of our guests and employees, including teammates who live and work on Maui, is our priority. We are working closely with the state of Hawaiʻi to support the transportation of first responders and supplies and help with the overall emergency response as best as we can,” the spokesperson continued.

United Airlines went as far as canceling all of its inbound flights to Maui so that planes can fly empty and “be used as passenger flights back to the mainland.”

American Airlines said it also added another flight and upgraded an aircraft “to ensure customers evacuating OGG [Kahului Airport] are able to do so.”

Delta Air Lines also is operating “extra sections out of Maui” to get people out of the impacted region.

Southwest Airlines, the second-largest carrier of Hawaii air travelers, also said it added service on Wednesday and Thursday, and plans to do so again Friday.

Beyond adding more flights, airlines are also providing travel waivers to give customers more flexibility to make travel changes without incurring any extra fees. Delta went as far as instituting fare caps.

Hawaiian is also offering $19 main cabin fares out of Maui to facilitate urgent travel needs. Since the state is discouraging non-essential travel to the area, the carrier is helping travelers change their flights or get a refund.

American said customers whose travel plans are affected by the wildfires can “rebook without fees, cancel, or receive a refund.”

In a Facebook post, Governor Josh Green asked Hawaii’s residents to provide all the emotional and financial support they can to residents of the town of Lahaina and Maui in general, calling the wildfires “the deadliest natural disaster the state has seen in generations.”

President Joe Biden also spoke about the Hawaii wildfires while traveling in Utah—pledging that federal disaster response will ensure that “anyone who’s lost a loved one or whose home has been damaged or destroyed is going to get help immediately.”

Biden promised to streamline requests for federal assistance and said the Federal Emergency Management Agency was “surging emergency personnel” on Maui. He also ordered all available Coast Guard and Air Force personnel on the island to work with the Hawaii National Guard to help.

Research contact: @FoxBusiness

September 4, 2024

Sizzler is a bit of an anomaly: Despite having shrunk to a fraction of its former size and retreating primarily to the West Coast, it’s a brand that remains a ubiquitous cultural touchpoint—in movies and online, on South Park and Saturday Night Live. And even if you’ve never eaten at one, you probably know what it is.

This made it a dream client for Mike Perry, founder and chief creative officer of Tavern, which collaborated with the beloved yet beleaguered chain on a comprehensive brand refresh spanning from its website to its stores, reports Fast Company.

“This brand is weirdly working backwards—it exists within the mind, but not necessarily in the world or in the hand,” Perry says. “It’s the most fun to take the brand that has been beaten up for decades and restore it. It’s not fun to take the shiny one and push it a little further.”

Digging into Sizzler’s past

When it launched in 1958 in Culver City, California, Sizzler helped invent the casual dining chain restaurant. It had its ups and downs over the years, but for an eatery known as much for its endless salad bar (which accounts for 40% of its business) as its affordable steaks, a global pandemic was not a great development.

The chain filed for bankruptcy in September 2020 and has been building back since. Today there are 75 locations (down from 270 at Sizzler’s peak). Christopher Perkins—formerly of Anheuser-Busch InBev—joined in 2019, and is now president and CEO.

Perkins says the brand had lost its way, and he knew it needed more than just a new coat of paint. He aspired for Sizzler to become a brand not locked in the past, but rather one of Southern California’s regional landmarks, like In-N-Out Burger, or Wawa on the East Coast.

In addition to losing its way, Perkins discovered that Sizzler had also lost its history, quite literally—there was no robust archive of assets and other ephemera. So he began to do a bit of archaeology into the company’s past, at one point sending a marketing intern on missions to the brand’s storage facility to see what could be dug up.

Prior to launching Tavern, Perry had worked on the Budweiser account at Jones Knowles Ritchie, which is where he originally met Perkins. Once Tavern came on board the project, Perry and Perkins immersed themselves in all things Sizzler—from store walk-throughs to the corporate side of the business—and did a bit of brand excavation of their own, buying up everything they could find on eBay.

In the end, Tavern saw the solution to Perkins’s problem as a “modern heritage” approach.

“It’s the search for timelessness,” Perry says. “The real tension between modernity and heritage and finding that is taking the old and ultimately making it new—and making it new so that it can continue to work in the future …. If you’re always trying to balance that, that’s really where the good stuff starts to come out.”

A cast of characters

One archival find was a steak-shucking bull character rendered in a Hanna-Barbera-esque style, which they dubbed Ribby Ribeye.

“All great brands have characters,” Perry says. “[Ribby Ribeye] is exactly what embodies a famous Southern California brand from both the midcentury and today, and it seemed like a no-brainer to bring back.”

Tavern built out a supplementary cadre of characters representing the brand’s other best-known offerings—the cheese toast, the unlimited shrimp, a lobster tail; and Perry’s favorite, the Salad Barbarian, an amorphous blob on a plate representing all the goods available at the beloved bar.

For the brand’s fonts, Tavern again turned to the past. Perry says Sizzler had used cuts of Windsor and Caslon Black Swash from its beginning through the mid-’80s or so, and they felt very Southern Californian in design and aesthetic, so his team utilized Windsor EF-Extra, Emfatick NF (a take on Caslon Black Swash), and Block Berthold Heavy and Condensed. For a contemporary feel, all the elements are blended with modern messaging and photography.

Tavern was given a mandate not to mess with the logo, so the team only slightly messed with the logo. They essentially cleaned it up—ditching the black background and dialing it back to a single color; refining the type in minute ways, and flattening it out. They also slanted it at an angle to drive home the notion of the brand’s cattle-brand element.

The Sizzler glow-up

Of course, all of these aesthetic updates mirror larger—and perhaps more consequential—changes. Tavern also worked on the restaurant interiors, uniforms, the living “brand” of how workers talk and embody the restaurant (think Chick-fil-A and all those “my pleasures”), the plates, and more.

It’s safe to say that if you stepped inside any of the competition in the category—Outback, Chili’s, Applebee’s, etc.—in the absence of a logo, you’d probably have no definitive idea of where you were. They all tend to look more or less the same: dark environments, menus with food shot on dark backgrounds, which Perry says doesn’t exactly convey freshness or taste.

So, the team sought to separate Sizzler from the rest of the pack by resurrecting the brand’s ownable red color, aiming for a bright and friendly overall vibe. The new website is now live, and Perkins says the changes will be rolling out to physical restaurants in phases.

In many ways, the rebrand is an attempt to remind the world that Sizzler is an anomaly. It exists in a space between chain restaurant and steak house, not to mention past and present. As for the future, the team says the key to all that nostalgia not feeling dated is to maintain a constant understanding of what is culturally relevant today—and then looking to the brand’s heritage and seeing what resonates with it.

As always, time will tell. For now, Perry says, “[After working] on big brands, we get bored of the brand a lot faster than the consumer. And just frankly [with Sizzler] I’m not—and that’s what I think a successful rebrand is.”

Research contact: @FastCompany