About this independent Hawaii zipline reference

An independent editorial reference for zipline and aerial-adventure travel, with the Hawaiian islands at its centre.

What this site is

This is a reference publication. It documents zipline courses, compares them on the same fields, and explains how the hardware and the safety systems work. Bookings are made with each operator direct, which is why the comparison tables can say that a well-known course has closed.

Piiholo Ranch ran a seven-line course in Upcountry Maui that is no longer operating. The course stays in the directory because its specifications are part of the island's record.

How the figures are sourced

Every number in the course directory comes from the operator's own published material: line counts, longest span, height above ground, minimum age and rider weight range. The source is named on each course profile. Three rules apply:

• If an operator does not publish a figure, the cell is a dash. It is never estimated and never copied from another guide.
• If an operator publishes two different numbers in two places, the profile says so instead of choosing the flattering one.
• Operating status is checked against the operator, not against other listings. This is the field most round-ups get wrong, sometimes for years.

The field-by-field version of that process, including what gets a course removed from the table, is written up in how this directory is compiled.

How the tables are ordered

The order follows the figures: island first, then operating status, then the fields printed in the columns. Where a page links out to a commercial site, the link is there because it is useful in that context.

Corrections

Operators change limits, courses reopen, and figures go out of date. If something here is wrong, the correction is welcome and the table gets fixed rather than argued about. The contact page is the route.

Why an independent reference is needed here

Zipline information online is almost entirely commercial. Operators describe their own courses, booking platforms describe whatever they can sell, and the round-ups are assembled from both. The result is that the figures which matter most, rider weight limits and whether a course is running at all, are the ones hardest to find in a comparable form. A reference with nothing to sell can print the weight window in a column and mark a famous course as closed, and neither decision costs it anything.

The Hawaiian islands are the centre of this reference because that is where the domain's history lies and because Hawaii is where the gap is widest: a small number of courses, heavy search demand, and listings that have gone years without being checked. The world pages exist to give the Hawaiian figures a scale to be read against, not because this is a global directory.

Editorial standards

• No invented figures. A missing number is a dash. This is the rule that most changes what the tables look like, and it is the one most often broken elsewhere.
• Status over specification. Line counts rarely change. Whether a course is operating changes often, and it is checked with the operator.
• No dates in the copy. Nothing here is written to look fresh; it is written to stay correct.
• Corrections published, not argued. A wrong row gets fixed.