Vacation – Resort Complaints

In the last blog post, I painted a pretty rosy picture of the resort. Like everything else, The resort was not perfect. Nothing horrible, but here are some of my complaints.

Before we reserved our room at the resort, I checked the user reviews on-line. In general the reviews were great, however there were a few complaints. The most common one was the price of the food and everything else at the resort. This is valid. The food and services were very expensive. Furthermore, it is very convenient to charge everything to the room and you don’t really know how much you are spending until you check out. But we expected this. The sit down restaurants are very expensive, however there were less expensive grills. We ate at the sit down restaurants a few nights, used the grills more often and ate off-site several times. One of the first days, we went into Kona, bought some bottled water, some fruit and rented a snorkel kit. This saved us some money as well. (The snorkel kit cost us $16 per week, at the resort they wanted to charge us $20 per day! There were similar savings on the bottled water.)

A second complaint is that the resort is not real. That is also very true. The resort sits in the middle of a large lava bed on the dry side of the island. Everything is shipped in, all the trees, the grass, even many of the birds. It is kind of interesting, they created a tropical forest environment on the dry side of the island. But the resort’s unreal-ness is the whole point. It is designed as a Disney-like tropical fantasyland. If you want an authentic Hawaiian experience, you should go elsewhere. We wanted a place to have fun and relax. We loved this place.

The third complaint is that the resort is designed to keep you on-site. Everything you would ever need is provided. You can easily stay here all week and never get bored. In fact, I suspect they make it troublesome to get off the resort. Our rental car was parked about 1.5 miles away and it could easily take 30 minutes to get to it. Clearly, the management wants you to stay on the resort and spend all of your money there. That’s ok with us, we were having a great time at the resort and we were never in a rush to get anywhere. When we wanted to get off-site, we planned plenty of time to get to our car.

I never saw a complaint about this, but I would guess that the resort would get very crowded during the “in-season”. Since we came in early November it was “off-season” and it never seemed too crowded. The only exception is that one night we came back to the resort and the resort entrance and the parking lot was jammed. It turns out that they were holding a “Miss Kona Coffee Scholarship Pageant” at the resort. Luckily, a helpful attendant guided us to the “last open parking space”.

In summary, there are some valid complaints about the resort, but none of them bothered us too much, we still had a great time.