Energy consumption is a major issue when designing routing protocols in wireless sensor networks. We propose a novel Hole Avoiding In advance Routing protocol (HAIR) to address this issue. In the proposed protocol, a data packet can avoid meeting a "hole" in advance instead of bypassing a hole when it meets the hole as existing Hole Avoiding Re-Routing protocols (HARR) do. We prove that the proposed protocol can always find a routing path between a given source node and the sink if such a routing path does exist in the network. Simulation studies show that the proposed HAIR protocol constructs routing paths with shorter routing distance and less energy consumption in comparison with the existing HARR protocols. The proposed protocol can be used in large-scale wireless sensor networks. © 2007 IEEE.