In the throes of responding to the Maui wildfires that razed the celebrated town of Lahaina and claimed over 110 lives, Hawaii remains mostly open for tourism, despite the misgivings of both residents and tourists.

“Do not come to Maui,” Kate Ducheneau, a Lahaina resident, said in a TikTok video that has been viewed more than two million times since it was posted on Sunday. “Cancel your trip. Now.”

“It’s just kind of a gut-wrenching feeling to see other people enjoying parts of their life that we used to welcome,” she said, adding that her home was severely damaged by fire and her family evacuated with minutes to spare.

Last week’s tragedy has intensified long-simmering tension over the archipelago’s economic reliance on tourism, a dependency that sparked anti-tourism protests in recent years and brought the state to its knees during the pandemic. Many residents, particularly in Maui, are furious over the uncomfortable, contradictory scenario of visitors frolicking in the state’s lush forests or sunbathing on white-sand beaches while they grieve the immense loss of life, home and culture. Others believe that tourism, while particularly painful now, is vital.

“People forget real quick right now, how many local businesses shut down during Covid,” said Daniel Kalahiki, who operates a food truck in Wailuku on Maui, east of Lahaina. The island needs to heal and the disaster areas are far from recovered, he said, but the tourist-go-home messaging is irresponsible and harmful.

“No matter what, the rest of Maui has to keep going on,” said Mr. Kalahiki, 52. “The island has already been shot in the chest. Are you going to stab us in the heart also?”

The devastating loss of life, and these conflicting messages, are causing travelers to grapple over the propriety of visiting Maui, or anywhere in Hawaii, in the near future, prompting them to ask if their dollars would help or their presence would hamper recovery efforts.

“If we’re in a Vrbo, is that going to take away from a potential person who’s been displaced?” said Stephanie Crow, an Oklahoman traveling to Maui this fall for her wedding.

Official guidance from the Hawaiian government has shifted in past week, first discouraging travelers from visiting the entire island of Maui, and now, from West Maui for the rest of the month. Travel to the other islands, including tourist-draws Kauai, Oahu and the Big Island, remains unaffected.

State tourism groups say that travel is encouraged to support Hawaii’s recovery and to prevent it from plunging into a deeper crisis.

“Tourism is Hawaii’s major economic driver, and we don’t want to compound a horrific natural disaster of the fires with a secondary economic disaster,” said Ilihia Gionson, a spokesman for the Hawaii Tourism Authority.

Vital to the economy

For those in the tourism industry, the year was off to a promising start. Visitor spending through June was $10.78 billion, a 17 percent increase compared to the same period last year, according to Hawaii’s Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. The pandemic’s woes were in the past.

But tension over growing tourist numbers was not. Hawaii has for decades been one of the top destinations for American and international visitors, and has struggled to balance tourism with residents’ demands to acknowledge and protect the islands’ traditional culture. Visitor-reliant countries like Jamaica, Thailand and Mexico navigate similar existential issues.

A year ago, John De Fries, the first Native Hawaiian to lead the Tourism Authority, told The New York Times that “local residents have a responsibility to host visitors in a way that is appropriate. Conversely, visitors have a responsibility to be aware that their destination is someone’s home, someone’s neighborhood, someone’s community.”

In the tourism agency’s most recent resident sentiment survey, issued in July, 67 percent of 1,960 respondents across four islands expressed “favorable” views of tourism in the state. But the same percentage agreed with the assertion: “This island is being run for tourists at the expense of local people.”

In the immediate days after the fires, frustration over visitors in Maui erupted.

“People are preying on trauma,” wrote Kailee Soong, a spiritual mentor who lives on Maui in Waikapu, on a TikTok post.

Tourists are still in stores even though resources are limited, said Ms. Soong, 33, in the video. “They are in the way right now as people mourn the loss of their loved ones, of the places that burned down, of the history that was completely erased.”

“Maui is not the place to have your vacation right now,” said the Oahu-born actor Jason Momoa in an Instagram Story. He posted an infographic that read “stop traveling to Maui,” and included guidance on how to make donations. There was fierce outcry after a Maui-based snorkeling company conducted a charity tour after the wildfires, leading the company to issue an apology and suspend operations.

“To hear that people are snorkeling in the water that people have had traumatic experiences and have died in, it’s hard to justify the reasoning behind why that would be viewed as acceptable,” Ms. Ducheneau, 29, said.

She works in property management and at a Lahaina restaurant, and noted that her family’s income is wholly dependent on tourists. Still, she said, “I just don’t think it’s an appropriate time to welcome tourism back into our area.”

The industry supplies approximately 200,000 jobs across the islands, and last year, a little over 9 million visitors spent $19.29 billion, according to the Tourism Authority. About 3 million visitors went to Maui, where the “visitor industry” accounts for 80 percent of every dollar generated on the island, the Maui Economic Development Board said.

“Just like everybody, we need to work. We just got over Covid. Things are just starting to get better. To think that everything might shut down again,” said Reyna Ochoa, a 46-year-old who lives in Haiku in North Maui and works several jobs outside of the tourism industry. “ The islands need the tourism and the income to rebuild.”

In Wailuku, Mr. Kalahiki said that his food-truck sales have dropped by half. Streets usually “popping” with tourists have been empty, he said, and there have been days when his wife, who has a beach apparel store in town, hasn’t sold a single item.

Travelers search for clarity

Then there are the travelers who have saved up for their first vacations in years, many with plans to reunite with family or to celebrate weddings and honeymoons. Many want to be respectful and are searching for clarity on what that looks like, deluging online forums to ask local residents where and when it is acceptable to visit.

Early next month, Danett Williams, 48, will spend her honeymoon on the Big Island, where fires burned in North and South Kohala.

For days, she and her fiancé went back and forth about canceling their trip, considering a road trip from their home in San Francisco instead. Ultimately, they decided their tourism dollars were helpful, as long as they stayed clear of other islands and did not take up necessary space or resources away from displaced residents, she said.

Others, like Ms. Crow, from Oklahoma, say that vendors like her wedding planner are asking her to keep their trip. In early September, Ms. Crow, 47, and her fiancé plan to get married on a beach in Kihei, about 20 miles south of Lahaina. It was supposed to be a wedding in a “happy, blissful paradise” setting, she said.

“These are first-world problems I’m dealing with. They’ve lost life, homes, income, they’ve lost everything,” Ms. Crow said.

Determining what to do has been overwhelming and conflicting, she added. And the shifting directives from officials were perplexing, she said.

‘We just need some time’

Marilyn Clark, a travel agent who specializes in trips to Hawaii, said the travel industry was in a “holding pattern” waiting for further government guidance.

Major hotels across Maui have relaxed their cancellation policies through the end of August, she said, but what hotels and vendors will offer beyond that is unclear, compounding the anxiety and confusion among travelers.

And travelers like Ms. Crow are unsure whether their presence will take away from the people who need shelter. In Lahaina alone, one official said that as many as 6,000 people may have lost their homes.

Some hotel operators say that they are offering rooms and other support to emergency responders, displaced residents and hotel staff. The state has secured 1,000 hotel rooms, most of which are north of Lahaina, in Kaanapali, said Kekoa McClellan, a spokesman for the Hawaii Hotel Alliance.

Joe Pluta, a West Maui community leader and real estate broker, is among the homeless. He is staying with his daughter after escaping the flames that destroyed his home and all his possessions.

Describing himself as a “top fan of tourism,” he however suggested that there were other ways to support Maui. The horror and grief is too raw, he said.

“This is not the proper time to come and play,” said Mr. Pluta, 74. “Come again, just give us some time. We just need some time.”

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

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Matt Tracy, 45, a shoe distributor based in Portland, Maine, loves to cook. On a recent multigenerational trip to Tuscany, he and other family members cooked seven out of 10 nights in a rental villa, preparing dishes like wild boar ragù for 10 people, including his children, 6 and 9.

​ “We save a tremendous amount of money cooking,” he said. “We love going out to dinner, but with two kids and other guests it’s expensive.”

​Whether catering to allergies or other dietary needs, ensuring family harmony or sticking to a budget, cooking on vacation is increasingly popular among travelers choosing short-term rental accommodations.

According to a 2023 travel trend report from the vacation rental platform Vrbo, demand for “foodie-menities” is on the rise. Sixty-five percent of users surveyed said equipment like a barbecue, air fryer and deluxe coffee machine were more important than the destination. Nearly half cook to reduce costs.

At Airbnb, “kitchen” is the third most searched amenity among rentals after pools and Wi-Fi. The rental platform made it easy to find accommodations with “chef’s kitchens” when it introduced various lodging categories in May 2022.

“The kitchen tends to be the heart and soul of vacation homes,” wrote Josh Viner, a regional operations director at the vacation rental home platform Vacasa, in an email. It is in the kitchen, he notes, that “guests gather to not only have a delicious, home-cooked meal, but also connect and relax.”

Convenience and exploration

Travelers who cook do it for many reasons: as a way to explore a place when shopping locally for ingredients; saving money; a family convenience; and more.

​ “Many clients like to have the cooking option,” said Rob Stern, a travel agent based in Raleigh, N.C., who runs RobPlansYourTrip.com, singling out “families on a budget or those who have picky eaters.”

​For others, meal prep brings them closer to their destination.

“When I’m trying to experience a place one of my favorite things to do is visit a grocery store,” said Tanya Churchmuch, 53, who runs a public relations firm in New York City.

​Preparing her own food also allows her to maintain a healthy diet. Even on trips as short as three days, she takes a mini espresso maker and steel cut oats and buys fruit locally to eat at least one meal in, saving, she estimates, between $15 and $30 a couple compared to dining out.

For Ashleigh Butler, the author of the cookbook “The Small Kitchen Cook” who has spent years living out of a camper van in her native Australia as well as North America, patronizing local markets “allows you to absorb the culinary culture whilst supporting local farmers and makers.”

​For frequent travelers, staying somewhere with a kitchen feels less isolating.

“There’s nothing harder than being in a regular hotel room, especially when you’re in places indefinitely,” said Gary Durant, 49, a sports agent from Toronto who is on the road 300 days a year, in an interview from a Level Hotels & Furnished Suites location in Los Angeles.

In the kitchen, he prepares simple dishes like eggs and pasta and entertains clients with delivery meals that he can properly heat and serve. “A kitchen with amenities feels like home away from home,” he said.

Renting a place with a fancy kitchen doesn’t have to cost more. While the “chef’s kitchens” category for Chicago Airbnbs recently had plenty of fancy rentals going for $1,200 and up, there was also a good selection under $200.

Controlling food costs

For gastronauts, going to places famed for their food makes the cooking not only exciting but cheaper and simpler.

“In Italy, you’re starting off already with great quality ingredients, which makes cooking Italian food so much easier because you don’t have to do so much to the ingredients,” said Jeff Michaud, 46, a Philadelphia-based chef who runs Osteria restaurant. With his wife, Claudia, he also runs the travel company La Via Gaia, which takes small groups to Italy for cooking classes and visits to cheesemakers, truffle hunters and pasta masters.

On average, he estimates he spends about a half to a third of what he would on equivalent ingredients at home, noting a loaf of bread often costs less than a dollar. “In Italy, food is still priced affordably,” he said.

When she travels in Europe, ​Diane Morgan, 68, a food writer and culinary instructor based in Portland, Ore., searches rental listings for appliances like a grill to keep the cleaning to a minimum.

​Three stays in the southern French town of Sablet offered her the chance to patronize local markets and bakeries.​ “It was really simple eating,” she said, describing fresh salads for her lunches. “I wasn’t trying to bake cakes but just be able to utilize the local produce and especially the cheeses.”

​Sampling local food in your rental kitchen doesn’t always require cooking skills.

“My hot French insider tip for travelers with kitchens: frozen food,” wrote Gayle Keck, 62, a writer from California who recently relocated to France, in an email. She recommended the frozen-food chain Picard as a time- and money-saver (four servings of salmon tartare costs 11.70 euros, or about $12.85). It’s also a taste of how the locals cheat with classics like duck confit and quiche Lorraine. “Picard is everyone’s little guilty secret.”

Packing salt, corkscrews and toothpicks

Sizing up a rental’s kitchen can be a hurdle for cooks on the road, resulting in unique packing lists.

Mr. Tracy, the wild boar ragù chef, travels with Better Than Bouillon roasted chicken base, toothpicks for spearing finger food, and a chef’s knife and a paring knife, both wrapped in a towel and stowed in checked baggage.

​In the summers of 2020 and 2021, Ms. Churchmuch and her wife relocated to Iceland to work remotely. “That’s when we started taking things like knives and a microplane,” she said. “No one has a grater in their apartment.”

On a recent trip to Philadelphia, Tara Crowley, 37, a chef based in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., chose the extended-stay hotel AKA University City because its open-plan kitchen allowed her to socialize with friends and family while cooking.

“I always travel with a wine key and bring along flaky Irish salt,” Ms. Crowley wrote in an email. “The salt elevates any dish.”

Eva Sobesky, an architect based in Los Angeles, tried to make it easier for renters to navigate the kitchen at her four-bedroom vacation home in coastal Manzanita, Ore., which she rents on Vrbo. Open shelves allow guests to see where dishes and glasses are. A large central countertop island lets others gather around the cook. An induction cooktop is efficient and easy to clean.

​ “To me, the kitchen is the heart of the house,” Ms. Sobesky said.

R.V.s and rental vans challenge cooks with limited work and storage space. Ms. Butler of the vanlife cookbook embraced the size limitations, which she said encouraged her to “be creative and also more thoughtful” with her recipes, which include pan-fried pizza and steamed cake.

Reducing food waste

When Covid restrictions limited her travel, Ms. Morgan managed a van trip in remote southeast Oregon by planning out meals like lamb curry ahead of time and washing greens in advance.

​ “We had no food waste on that trip,” she said.

At home or afar, food waste is the pitfall of cooking. The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that 31 percent of food produced each year nationally is wasted at the retail and consumer levels.

That figure may be higher among travelers. In preliminary results, the first phase of a study by the Environmental Protection Agency in Telluride, Colo., over high-season summer and winter time periods found that 70 percent of trash was recoverable, meaning it could have been recycled or composted.

“Sometimes I go into an apartment and the amount of food people have left is incredible,” said Bob Garner, who rents short-term vacation homes in Italy and last year launched EnviroRental, a website for property hosts to learn how to operate more sustainably. “I could live off it for a week.”

Mr. Garner advises guests to shop for half of their stay. “Buy less, don’t over-shop the first day and you’ll save money and won’t worry about food waste,” he said.

While reducing waste is an individual responsibility, the new organization Sustonica certifies short-term rentals based on sustainable practices, including waste reduction among its criteria. The requirements call for at least four recycling bins — glass, paper, plastic and organic — and supplying reusable shopping bags. Sustonica aims to have 70,000 properties vetted by year end.

Earlier this year, Diane Daniel, a short-term rental host in Indian Rocks Beach, Fla., founded the nonprofit Vacation Donations to help visitors and other property managers find ways to donate food and items like books and beach toys.

​In addition to buying less, Ms. Daniel recommends travelers ask short-term rental hosts if they have a system for donating food and other things.

​ “In my wildest dream, keeping things out of the waste bin will be part of what you expect and demand in your rentals,” she said.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023.

The first cabin constructed in Kerlingarfjöll, a mountain range in central Iceland bracketed by two glaciers and threaded with geothermal steam, was completed in 1937 and gave hikers a launchpad from which to wander the otherworldly landscape. Then, in the ’60s, a summer ski school and hostel operated on its slopes. The school is long gone, but the adventuring spirit remains, and now intrepid travelers have a sophisticated new place to stay. The hospitality company Blue Lagoon Family — responsible for the first luxury hotel at Iceland’s famed Blue Lagoon — recently debuted Highland Base, a collection of accommodations that include that original cabin, seven salvaged rustic A-frames, six stand-alone lodges and a hotel with 46 rooms and two suites with their own hot tubs on private terraces. Picture windows in all of the rooms and lodges offer views of the surrounding terrain, which can be explored on foot in the summer and by snowmobile in winter. The hotel, about a three-hour drive from Reykjavík, will be open year round, though in the colder months visitors must hire a professional driver in a four-wheel-drive super jeep to reach the property, thanks to the unpaved highland roads. Once there, guests will find underground passageways connecting the hotel with the restaurant and thermal baths (scheduled to open this winter) to help them stay warm in between expeditions. Rooms from $450 a night, highlandbase.is.

Drink This

Amaro Made With Plants Foraged in New York City

For his latest act, the chef and artist Gerardo Gonzalez has steeped and brewed New York City into a digestif. At his exhibition Into an Isle, opening on Aug. 23 at the Ace Hotel New York, Gonzalez will present three batches of amaro, an Italian liqueur infused with citrus, spices and a mixture of herbs. Each of Gonzalez’s bottles is made with plants from one of three areas around the city: Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens, Grand Concourse and Williamsbridge Oval park in the Bronx and a corridor of East Ninth Street in the East Village of Manhattan. Gonzalez biked over 350 miles through the city during the month of July, collecting edible material for his infusions, including arugula, mulberry leaves and wild mugwort. “The whole purpose was to synthesize a flavor based on my experience at each site,” says Gonzalez. Before his residency at the Ace, Gonzalez was the chef of El Rey and Lalito in Manhattan and, most recently, part of the culinary events team at Grand Cayman’s Palm Heights hotel. At the opening reception for the exhibition, attendees will be able to sample each amaro and view Gonzalez’s installation of the three liqueurs, displayed in large Italian glass fermentation bottles perched on podiums alongside examples of the vegetation he used. Gonzalez has also transcribed his bike routes on the walls of the exhibit in pencil. Opening reception Aug. 23, 7 to 9 p.m. at the Ace Hotel New York, acehotel.com.

Last week in Copenhagen, Denmark, members of the fashion crowd were spotted wearing cloudlike dresses, trending trainers and street-sweeping trench coats to see the spring 2024 runway shows from Nordic designers. Copenhagen Fashion Week has distinguished itself from other fashion events around the world by establishing a set of Minimum Sustainability Standards: Among other requirements, 50 percent of the materials from each collection must meet globally recognized sustainability certifications or be made from any of a list of preferred or reused materials; unsold clothing or samples should be preserved; and the sets produced for each show should incur zero waste. The Danish designer Amalie Røge Hove kicked off the shows at the Design Museum with a collection of knitwear from her label A. Roege Hove. Woven in Italy, each garment is created through a process that tries to eliminate all excess fabric, producing only exact quantities. In the Finland room of the Radisson Blu Hotel, the Helsinki-based designer Ervin Latimer presented the latest from his brand Latimmier: reconstructed suits and button-down shirts influenced by queer ballroom culture and made to inspire various expressions of masculinity. “We use as much local material production and dyeing as we can, such as vegetable tanned leathers and naturally dyed silks and cottons,” Latimer says. And another environmentally minded young designer, the Copenhagen-based Nicklas Skovgaard, showcased a series of one-of-a-kind garments, such as a high-neck, broad-shouldered coat made from a brushed wool and mohair textile. “All of the hand-woven fabrications are designed, developed and woven locally in our studio in Østerbro,” Skovgaard says.

Visit This

Jean Cocteau’s Countryside House, Preserved and Reopened to the Public

Sixty years after the death of the Surrealist French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, the house that was his refuge has been saved for good. Cocteau bought the house in the small town of Milly-la-Forêt, 31 miles west of Paris, with his lover, the actor Jean Marais, in 1947. Working with his friend the French interior designer Madeleine Castaing, he decorated it with set pieces from his plays and art by Man Ray, Modigliani, Picasso and Warhol. In his study, the side table and a cork bulletin board were covered with photographs, drawings and various souvenirs, among them a bust of Lord Byron, a signed photograph of Orson Welles as Othello and a drawing of Charles Baudelaire by Manet. The walls were covered in leopard-print fabric. Cocteau spent the last 17 years of his life here, “learning about the magnificent stubbornness of the vegetal kingdom,” as he wrote to a friend, in the gardens he created. After his death in 1963, his adopted son preserved the house and the contents of its rooms as they were. The building was further restored by the foundation of Pierre Bergé, the former president of Yves Saint Laurent, who reopened it to the public in 2010. When Bergé died, the house’s future was in doubt. Ultimately, it was purchased by the Île-de-France Regional Council in 2019. Covid closures and budgetary constraints created further uncertainty about whether it would survive but, following a trial reopening in 2022, it was announced this year that the houses’s seasonal opening and cultural programs would officially be made permanent. Open this year until Oct. 29, 2023, Thursday through Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., maisonjeancocteau.com.

Perch Here

At a New England Resort, Tree Houses Made From Reclaimed Wood

Twin Farms, the luxury resort set on 300 thickly wooded acres in Barnard, Vt., plans to open eight new tree houses this fall, in time for its 30th anniversary. To access the lofty accommodations — each one sleeps two — guests will traverse a wooden bridge suspended 20 feet in the air. Inside, a neutral palette and oversize windows are meant to direct all attention outdoors. The décor includes dining tables made by local master craftspeople, and decorative objects like bread boards, or wooden bowls from the Vermont-based artist Andrew Pearce, that are seconds — slightly flawed and one-of-a-kind. Those who stay in the tree houses will have access to all of Twin Farms’s activities (which include picnicking, hiking and kayaking) in addition to their own exclusive options: From an Adirondack chair on the deck or a soaking tub next to a window, guests can listen for the 250-odd species of warblers that make their homes in the surrounding woods. From $3,500 a night, all inclusive, twinfarms.com.