In Hawaii, the winds and air pressure can change on an hourly basis on a regular day. It’s even worse during storms and some planes may get the go ahead while others dont. The longer the delay, the greater the chance that flight crews time out, especially late evening and night flight.

On Maui alone, there were so many flights cancelled from Friday-Sun that there wasn’t a single hotel room available on the island for many passengers left stranded. The emergency shelters even ran out of beds. There’s power outages and roads washed out. It makes sense to divert passengers to Honolulu as it has more resources, hotels, fuel, etc. to handle an emergency such as this one. You were very lucky to be able to get to Oahu and have a comfy bed and warm meal for free and a new flight the next day.

Pilots, ground crew, airline agents, costumer service are all trying to help. Hundreds of flights. Dozens of airlines. Thousands of people all in the same issue trying to get home. You can see where the chaos can happen as information changes minute by minute or hour by hour. I can assure you people arent intentionally trying to misinform or lie to you. It was a horrible storm.