Waikiki....7 nights $399*

HONOLULU —  Stop smirking, travel snobs. I stand with my brethren on the Arrivals level of Honolulu International Airport, not quite fresh from the five-hour flight on American Trans Air, ready for a cheap week of white sands, warm, blue tides and tall, green palms. My complimentary luggage tags are in place. My hotel voucher and Hilo Hattie’s discount coupon are in hand. An absolutely free tote bag will soon be mine, along with two free nights at the Gold River Resort Hotel & Casino in Laughlin, Nev. And my festive lei greeting is about to begin.

A smiling young man with an aloha shirt and clipboard directs about 50 of us into the custody of our official photographer. She coaches us and snaps. A shirtless, ostensibly Hawaiian man drapes flower necklaces around our heads, extends thumb and pinky, and flashes the ever-popular island hand signal: Hang loose.

Later, of course, we’ll have the opportunity to buy copies of the pictures. But now it’s time to board the bus for our free airport-hotel transfer, and rumble over to the skyscrapers of Waikiki. Let the vacation begin!

And why, exactly, is this vacation beginning with this unfamiliar airline, these cheerful, clipboard-wielding strangers and these self-conscious exercises?

Because we are package tourists. Package tourists make certain allowances, endure certain rituals and are accused by holier-than-thou jet-setters and adventurers of being sheep-like and uncool. But package tourists get really good prices, enjoy reduced logistical responsibilities, have more independence than travelers on an escorted tour . . . and did I mention the really good prices? Most Americans who visit Hawaii, and most Californians, do so on package and group tours. And right now, thanks to a well-financed upstart’s challenge to the longtime 800-pound gorilla of tourism in these islands, Hawaiian package vacation prices are difficult to ignore. As the spring sales season began, the gorilla, Pleasant Hawaiian Holidays, and the well-financed upstart, Sunquest Holidays, were each advertising weeklong packages for under $400 per person (assuming double occupancy), with shorter trips for even less. Pleasant Hawaiian had billboards pitching seven nights in Waikiki for $399; Sunquest had newspaper ads offering five nights for $299.

For such prices, a person gets round-trip air fare, a big Waikiki hotel, the aforementioned festive lei greeting and various other perks, but no meals except for the first-morning briefing breakfast. Of course, there are small-print provisions: to get the very lowest price, the trip often must begin and end on days of lowest demand (usually weekdays) and rooms must be available at the very cheapest participating hotel. (Since I am traveling alone and on short notice, I can’t get the rock-bottom rate; I’m paying $455.14 for round-trip air and three nights’ lodging. I am also traveling anonymously, not mentioning that I am a Times reporter.)

Even with the small print, the prices on these packages are low enough to make a person think. And veteran Hawaii-watchers are guessing that, with the exception of a jump in rates for Easter week, this competition could help hold down prices of dozens of other companies that sell Hawaii vacation packages through travel agents. So, if you haven’t taken a package tour to the islands recently, all this marketplace jostling points to a crucial question: Exactly what does a Hawaii vacationer get for the low prices?

*

Now we’re rolling from airport to hotel in a big bus. There’s Hilo Hattie’s, home of the world’s largest aloha shirt. There’s the Ala Moana Tower, centerpiece of a recently revitalized shopping area. There’s the old Ilikai Hotel, where Jack Lord was seen standing during the opening sequence of “Hawaii 5-0.” And here’s my stop.

I step out to confront the Outrigger Maile Sky Court Hotel. The Sky Court is a 596-room Waikiki skyscraper, in no way lavish, and stands about 10 minutes’ walk from the beach, across the traffic-choked main drag, Kalakaua Avenue. It is one of four low-end hotels generally used by Pleasant Hawaiian for its cheapest packages. (Sunquest plans to use the Kuhio Village Court Hotel, similarly spartan and also about 10 minutes from the beach, for its lowest-priced trips.)

My room is clean but small and plain, with a noisy air-conditioning unit. My bags will arrive in about half an hour, having been brought by another bus, then lugged upstairs by a porter.

I am without a balcony, without room service, without a hotel restaurant (although the downstairs T.G.I. Friday’s more or less fills that role). A notice above the sink warns that “for the protection of the environment and our associates, we request that you call Housekeeping for a container for your syringes.”

If I wish to lock my valuables in my safe, I have to pay $3 a day. If I don’t pay, I have to sign a waiver that states, in effect, that I’m storing items in my room at my own risk. This gets me to thinking about all the ways hotels look to make an extra dollar here and there, and I start noting details I otherwise might have bypassed: the coffee maker in my room, for instance, with instant coffee packets carrying a charge of $1.25 each.

But for the next three days, the maids do their job well and the front desk staffers are helpful. I don’t hear any of my fellow guests complaining.

“I’m here for a job interview. I had to have the cheapest air fare and hotel rooms I could get,” says Ann Simun of Long Beach, who with her husband, Ronald Park, is staying a few floors beneath me and getting a little sightseeing in. Their room, they say, is neither more nor less than they expected.

They seem to have done their math: The average hotel room in the state of Hawaii rented for about $128 last year; the average room in Waikiki, about $118. And the cost of these rooms works out to $85 per night or less. You get what you pay for.

Simun and Park were also pleasantly surprised by the flight over, as I was. American Trans Air (ATA), the scheduled airline that carries most Pleasant Hawaiian travelers, has no frequent-flier program, aims for leisure travelers, and carries about 2.4 million passengers yearly to Hawaii and elsewhere, a paltry sum compared to Delta, American and United’s worldwide counts of more than 75 million each.

*

When I boarded the L-1011 on Jan. 27, I was ready to face the shortcomings that mark many vacation flights: squeezed-together seats and minimal service, for instance. Instead, the seating space was no worse than on major carriers, the attendants were helpful (and raffled off cookies and a beach towel), the meal was adequate, and before we landed, a voice told us which luggage carousel would carry our bags. Same performance on the return flight. If all the major carriers’ flights went this well, we’d all be happier travelers.

On the morning after arrival, we board more buses and shuttle to another hotel, and a ballroom full of sales representatives and performers strumming ukuleles. This is our free breakfast briefing.

There are about 200 of us, and not one good suntan in the lot. The breakfast is a cursory thing--they hand you a plate of eggs, bacon and fruit, no coffee or juice refills, and that’s that--but our hosts are relentlessly cheerful and well-armed with information. George, our Pleasant Hawaiian master of ceremonies, welcomes us, asks for a show of hands and determines that most of us are first-timers. Also, most are spending at least four days on Oahu. He reminds the men that just about any shirt with a collar qualifies as fine evening wear, and points out that the proper pronunciation of the word “muumuu” has four syllables (MOO-oo MOO-oo). He proclaims that “our volcanoes are the safest in the world.” And he starts selling.

We hear about Pearl Harbor tours, snorkeling excursions, bicycle rentals, magic shows, oldie shows island tours, Oahu landmarks, Maui highlights and Big Island wonders. The prices available in this room, George says, are as good or better than any we’ll be able to find outside, sorting through visitor publications and advertisements. We choose the ones we like, hand over credit cards, pick up our absolutely free tote bags and accept our free shell necklaces.

Later, on the bus to the Polynesian Cultural Center, I meet Herve Nicot and Christina Mueller, a young couple from Germany who came to San Francisco when he landed an engineering internship, then decided to add Hawaii to their American adventure. They bought a package after seeing it in a newspaper ad. Now, two days into a seven-day trip, Mueller says she’s “surprised at how cheap it is, for all the service.”

Truly, not all of Hawaii’s budget travelers hang this loose. I ask for war stories at the activities desk of a major Waikiki hotel, and the sales representative says: “It’s hard to believe sometimes. I’ll be sitting here at the activities desk, and a guy will walk up and say, ‘I’ve got $150 for the week. What should I do?’ All I can do is tell him to go right back to your room. If you’re not spending the day on the beach, any activity is likely to cost at least $40 to $50.”

*

I spend the next several days on the Oahu tourist circuit, doing many of those things that the briefing-breakfast and activities-desk people want me to do. Making these rounds, a skeptic can begin to see the islands’ network of mass tourism attractions as stations on an assembly line. And a crowded line it is: Just short of 5 million visitors arrived in Oahu last year, 2.35 million from North America, 2.63 million from Asia. The tourists choose their favorite stations, and are delivered by bus, plane, catamaran and commercial submarine. Then there’s a pause for service delivery and currency extraction--more than 90% of Hawaii’s workers are in the service industry--and then the tourists are moved along to the next station.

However, none of this means the attractions are necessarily a bad value, or that they can’t be entertaining.

*

The beach at Waikiki, for instance, is no place for seekers of solitude. But even if you never dip a toe in the warm, gentle tides, it’s a world-class people-watching experience. And until you get hungry, it’s free. On my first afternoon I stroll over to the sand, buy a strawberry smoothie for $3.50 and take in the scene.

There’s a 60ish man with flesh of leather and a regrettable thong bathing suit. A pair of surfing instructors, blond and tousled, reclining cooly in the shade. A gaggle of giggling Japanese schoolgirls in Day-Glo swimsuits. Surfboards of many colors. Idle outriggers. Industrious tots constructing sand castles. I can’t complain about my island tour, either. For $22 per adult, our E Noe Tours guide-driver takes us on a four-hour circle that includes Pali Lookout (a letdown on a day of thick clouds and low visibility); snorkeler-friendly Hanauma Bay (although we can only look for a few minutes, then climb back in the bus); the inside of Diamond Head Crater.

My evening of night life is a less successful experiment. Weighing the relative merits of such Honolulu favorites as Don Ho, Charo, the Magic of Polynesia, a “Legends in Concert” revue and two rival luaus (all priced from $29 to $60 per person), I cast my lot with the Society of Seven, a local group that has been playing for 25 years at the Outrigger Main Showroom. My ticket costs $31.20 and entitles me to one free drink.

To get in, I wait in a long line of mostly middle-age vacationing mainlanders. Inside the showroom, I sense things going south as soon as the tightly programmed music cranks up. Seven beaming men take places on the stage and begin dashing through pop medleys. Then one of them begins an introduction by saying: “You know, ladies and gentlemen, the magic of Disney reaches out to everyone. . . .”

And I know that while many may be pleasantly diverted here this evening, I have put my jaded self in the wrong place. I can’t get out of there soon enough.

My other night out was a world apart, and has been a mainstay of mainstream Hawaiian tourism for more than three decades: The Polynesian Culture Center.

Hotel rooms and air fares aside, the Polynesian Cultural Center may be the largest single investment most budget travelers make on Oahu. My ticket, which included transportation from Waikiki, a buffet dinner and the lively show of dancing, drumming and fire-juggling, cost $62. This is as close as Hawaii gets to Disneyland, and people want that. Around midday I scramble onto a nearly full bus for the 44-mile ride to the backside of the island. Arriving, we find more than 30 other buses have rolled in ahead of us.

Operated since 1963 as a 42-acre theme park celebrating the island groups of Polynesia, this enterprise is controlled by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and staffed mostly by students of Brigham Young University’s Oahu campus. . Most tourists seem to scarcely notice the religious underpinnings of the place. Wandering the lushly landscaped grounds, the tourists peek into palm-frond huts, take elementary hula lessons and admire the traditional tattoos covering the arms and legs of beefy young men.

At 2:30 p.m., we gather to take in the live music, quasi-traditional dancing and the myth-retelling of the daily canoe pageant. Later, we watch a crew-cut man from Washington state as he is coaxed to the stage, then gently mocked by a skilled Tongan drummer and comedian. This is pricier than the people-watching in Waikiki, but my investment has covered seven hours of entertainment, food and 88 miles of transportation. On the bus ride back to Waikiki, I hear some fellow travelers snoring in exhaustion but none complaining.

Boarding the jet back to Southern California, the mood is about the same. The only snag on the return flight, it seems, is a shortage of overhead baggage space. All those souvenir-filled complimentary tote bags, no doubt.

But did I mention the really good price?

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK

Waikiki in a Package

The easiest way to buy a package vacation is through a travel agent, who should be able to reel off a handful of offerings to match your tastes. (Many packagers advertise their 800 numbers, but they prefer to make sales through travel agents.)

Aside from Pleasant Hawaiian, (telephone [800] 242-9244) and Sunquest (tel. [800] 357-2400), packagers often specialize. Classic Hawaii (tel. [800] 221-3949) or Runaway Tours (tel. [800] 622-0723), for example, concentrate on custom packages, use scheduled airlines (rather than cheaper charters) and aim up market. Others, including United Vacations (tel. [800] 328-6877) and Delta Dream Vacations (tel. [800] 872-7786) and American’s Fly AAway Vacations (tel. [800] 321-2121) try to capitalize on your frequent-flier program loyalties.

Other major Hawaii packagers include Blue Sky Tours (based in Albuquerque), Creative Leisure International (in Petaluma, Calif.), Hawaii World (in Livermore, Calif.), MTI Vacations (in Oak Brook, Ill.) and Sunmakers (in Seattle).

Always keep in mind that prices depend heavily on demand and season. This week--spring break for many schools--will cost a lot more than the week after. The market is always changing. San Jose-based Suntrips abruptly stopped serving the islands last September when its charter air carrier, Rich International Airways, was grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration. Thousands of travelers’ plans were thrown into disarray.

* COMPETITION: Other firms enter the market. Page L20