Ugh, that's really awful. My tech savvy husband noted right away when we were heading to the airport for our flight from HNL to KOA that the flight was delayed.....from seeing it on FlightAware. For our last flight, we were unplugged from the news, so only heard about the massive outage on May 12th...when we checked out at our hotel on the 13th. We received no emails or alerts from them.
The Hawaiian Airlines app was useless...didn't show up with the accurate time until around 5 minutes before boarding...same with time at the gate. Also, there always seems to be a super long standby list for every flight. I think that's people who have a flight that is crazy delayed, or people who just come to the airport and hope for the best? Also, on the HNL to KOA flight, he noticed about 30 minutes before boarding that the boarding passes on his phone were no longer showing up. At that time, I noticed lots of people approaching the gate and receiving hard tickets to board....so we did that as well. The gate agent said that happens "all the time". So...not the tightest operation.
As for the planes...we only flew on the 717 Boeings that they use between islands. For our flights, we did have "first class" tickets....which is just 8 leather seats in the front...slightly bigger, little more incline for only $60-$80 more per person. We primarily booked those seats as we had only carry-ons and would not check luggage...and knew we'd get our luggage on board with those seats. A ton of people had to gate check luggage. Well, thankfully I read from a "points guy" article that you need to literally be the first two people in line out of the eight....because the flight attendants/crew uses three out of the four "first class" overhead bins for safety equipment.....and other storage. And so what they did was take the luggage from others in first class and place them back in the bins over seats 4-5/6. And so when those folks boarded, their luggage is back another row or so....and so on. And so when you land, everyone is having to go backwards to get their carry-ons. The whole thing seemed to be so stupid....made no sense at all. Just not well thought through.
I will say that the Flight Attendants were very apologetic on our last flight...after the big outage/delays from the day before bled over to our day. Like you....had we known that we were 1.5 hours delayed, we would have had enough time for one last 45 minute snorkel session off of the beach and a shower before heading out.