When making flight reservations, if the ticket price for coach is particularly high, I will check the price for first class. Sometimes coach and first class are actually the same price - I have only seen this on domestic flights.

Sometimes a discounted FC fare (with restriction) is lower than a full-fare Y.

We have flown both coach and first class to Hawaii. We will now only fly first class. What a difference there is in the way we feel once we arrive on the islands. We eat better, our backs don't hurt and we don't feel so tired either. We are going back to Hawaii in March and are flying with AA. We have found them to be wonderful as far as service. This will be our 13th trip over to Hawaii from the East coast and our third time in first class. It makes all the difference in the world. Trust me on this one.

We recently flew from the Est Coast to Oahu and back; American outbound and Delta inbound. In "First Class" both ways and on 767's both ways...

The "Firt Class" on American was actually in a compartment what would normally be branded as "Business Class" but the food and service were very good and the seat pitch was very good.

The Delta flight..seat pitch not nearly as good as on AA and the service not as attentive.

Neither plane had seats which recline as far as I would have liked.

We got the tickets at a considerable discount through www.onetravel.com

I have to agree with the other posters here. We go to Maui at least every other year. We got lucky once and used a ticket broker who somehow got us first class tickets for just a little more than coach. We're now hooked. We won't even go if we can't figure out a way to fly first. So, we obtained a Hawaiian Airlines Visa, we use it for everything and have become quite the mileage whores. We're leaving for the islands on 8/4 and flying first round trip with our two sons all off of mileage upgrades! There are better first classes than Hawaiian, but as one of the other posters noted, they go out of their way to make your hawaiian experience start before you ever leave the runway!

we fly from Newark to Honolulu on Continental ( non-stop) - excellent first class service.