Thanks to accruing hundreds of thousands of Hilton Honors points over the past few years, we were able to stay at a couple Hilton properties for a number of free nights during our recent trip to Hawaii. The place we stayed at on the Big Island of Hawaii was the Hilton Waikoloa Village - an expansive 64-acre resort that featured a number of restaurants, bars and a lot of things to do for those who didn't want to leave the facility. We stayed there for the first six nights of our vacation in Hawaii.
Even though the address for the Hilton Waikoloa Village is listed as being in Waikoloa, but as far as I can tell there's no Waikoloa. It's actually near a small unincorporated village called Anaehoomulu (see map). There is a Waikoloa Village, HI, but it's about five miles up into the hills north and east of the area where the hotel is (see map). So you can see it can be pretty confusing if you don't know exactly where you're going.
The Hilton Waikoloa Village is part of a much larger complex of other resorts, villas and condos, golf courses and small shopping centers known as the Waikoloa Beach Resort. It was initially built a number of years ago on land that had been once part of the huge Parker Ranch, which was then licensed to the U.S. Navy as an artillery range and a training ground for Marines. After World War II, the Navy gave the land back to Parker Ranch, but had to clean up the land. One account I read said that a number of unexploded ordinances could still be buried under the land and a restricted area is fenced off south and east of where our hotel was.
In the 1980's, a Japanese development company, Nansay, came in and bought up parcels of land in the Hawaiian islands to develop into golf course resorts. Two of those parcels became the planned community of Waikoloa Village and the other was the Waikoloa Beach Resort area. One of the first resorts that was built and opened in 1988 was the present day Hilton Waikoloa Village. However, the original tenants of the property was the Hyatt corporation. Hilton took over the property about 15 years ago.
The land where the Hilton Waikoloa Village is on was once a marshy area embedded in the surrounding lava rock. I would have loved to have seen pictures before the land was developed. It's sort of interesting and strange at the same time that they were basically able to create this lush green oasis surrounded by this forbidding lava rock field.
The Hilton Waikoloa Village is segmented into three different hotel buildings - the Lagoon, the Palace and the Ocean. When I had made reservations last fall, my free points would only get us a room in the Palace building. But for $25 bucks a night, we could upgrade to the Ocean tower rooms for a more scenic view. (The Ocean tower is the building in the foreground that looks like three loops.) That was a no-brainer. And I purposely asked for a top floor room. While our room didn't give us a direct view of the ocean, I sort of liked our view better because we got a full view of the small bay, the ocean in the not-so-long-distance, and views of the top of Mauna Kea and the smaller, but closer, Hualalai dormant volcano. A bulk of the Hilton property was visible from our balcony, as well.
In doing some editing for this post, I just chopped about six paragraphs. I'm not even going to go into detail like I originally had regarding our arrival on the Big Island because re-reading the whole ordeal brought my blood to a boil.
After we landed at Kona around 9:30 local time (1:30 a.m. body-time), it's somewhat of an understatement to say we had some difficulty getting our rental car (due to a very stupid person in line in front of me) and getting to the hotel (a normal 20 minute drive from the airport took over an hour as the main road was closed due to a traffic accident). It was about 11:30 when we finally got our room keys.
After we checked in, we waited for the tram to take us to the Ocean tower. We learned as time went on that the trams were not the best option when it came to going to the Ocean tower which was the farthest building on the property from the lobby.
The trams they used at the Hilton Wiakoloa Village were designed in Switzerland and replaced the original trams that were in use since the property opened in the late 80's. They weren't fast, but were efficient. As I said, if you caught them right, they were good. If you had to wait, it was excruciating. We waited 15 minutes for a tram to show up that evening and it was midnight - 4:00 a.m. body-time - when we got into the room. We'd been up for 24 hours straight traveling to Hawaii. Ugh!
Also, the Hilton Waikoloa Village had a Disney-designed open-aired boat and canal system that ran between all the hotel buildings. The boats were powered, but they ran on an underwater track so they wouldn't bang into anything. It seemed to be a little more efficient than the tram and was sort of fun to ride. But it would fill up quickly and you could only get about 15 to 18 people on a boat. Cindy said the first time we rode the boat back to the room that it reminded her of the time she went to Disneyland and went on the "It's a Small World" ride. When I found out that it was the same type of boat system as what Disney had at Disneyland, each time Cindy would get on the boat she'd sing, "It's a small world, after all. It's a small world, after all..."
When we didn't make the tram or the boat - which was the vast majority of the time - we would walk through a series of corridors that contained millions of dollars of Asian, Polynesian and Hawaiian artwork including pottery, statues, paintings and even samples of indigenous clothing used by islanders. Actually, it was pretty cool. In addition to the art walk, there was a number of Hindu statues all over the resort grounds.
This is the large Buddha at Buddha Point on the far side of the hotel grounds. Buddha Point was a great place to watch the sunset and to see humpback whales off in the not-so-far distance during the early morning sunrise. This was one of Cindy's favorite places to go first thing in the morning before breakfast.
Speaking of breakfast, the Hilton Waikoloa Village featured five or six restaurants (depending upon what you classified as a restaurant) along with a handful of bars. The breakfast area was in a large room that featured a buffet, omelet bar and a number of cereals to choose from. Breakfast was a little expensive - $26.95 per person. But being a Hilton Honors Diamond member, we were able to get a $10 cut per person on breakfast making it a more palitable $16.95. And it was pretty good. The breakfast area was good for families, of which there seemed to be a lot of at the Hilton Waikoloa Village.
Actually, much of Hilton Waikoloa Village is geared toward families. We were sort of surprised by that, but then we really shouldn't have been. We usually stay away from places that have a family atmosphere because there's nothing better than some little kid throwing a temper tantrum at the table next to you while you're trying to eat - as what happened at breakfast one morning. Quite honestly, Cindy and I were amazed at the number of young families who had their pre-school kids with them at the resort. If I were a young father, the last thing I'd want to do is bring the kids to Hawaii with me.
One of the big things for families was the Dolphin pool. Actually, there's no dolphin shows as the dolphin pool at the Hilton Waikoloa Village is just a training facility for dolphins. The five salt water pools that hold the dolphins are fed directly by the Pacific Ocean. There are a team of biologists/trainers who work with the dolphins. I'm not certain what they do with the dolphins after their "trained". That was one question we forgot to ask a young - and enthusiastic - intern who came over to where we were standing watching the dolphins one afternoon. She was overly helpful in letting us know about the dolphins and the training they were going through. In fact, the Hilton had a program that would allow you to "swim" with the dolphins. We saw one of those sessions and it did look pretty interesting.
Thankfully, there were areas where you could get away from kids. One of which was the adult pool that was in a lagoon-type courtyard inside the Ocean tower. This is the view from outside the front door of our room looking down across the lagoon into the adult pool area. There was a bar with wait-staff service and it was a nice respite from the screaming little kids who were having fun in the water slide area on the other side of the building near the bay. And even though we didn't try it, the bar area also had their own sushi bar. It was a popular place at night.
And the Hilton was also "gay-friendly" - which is pretty much the norm for the whole state of Hawaii. The night we arrived, we immediately saw a couple of gay males nuzzling each other on one of the benches waiting for the tram. The next morning, we shared our tram car with an elderly German man and his younger black partner. Nice guys, but they made for a interesting couple. Not that there's anything wrong with gay people - we have neighbors who are gay and they're great guys. But it would be a little difficult to explain to your five-year-old son why those two men were holding hands as they looked at the artwork in the corridors.
Talking about bars again, they had the Malolo Lounge (Malolo is a volcanic island near Fiji) just off the open-air lobby at the hotel. After a long day on the road out exploring parts of the Big Island, we wandered into the bar for a snack and a mai tai. Our waitress, April, was a young native woman and she was great to talk with about the culture, the happenings and what was going on around the hotel. She confessed that business had been pretty slow lately - the hotel during our visit may have been one-third occupancy - but she was hoping things would pick up soon. She said, "Some of the regulars that would visit us every year haven't been here for a couple years now." She did say more corporations were having retreats or conferences at the hotel, however. She said a big one with over 700 people was going to be starting that weekend.
Cindy asked April about the lu'au the hotel put on. April told us that they used to do the lu'au four times a week. Now they only do it twice a week (Tuesday and Friday nights). She said her husband used to be in charge of some aspects of the lu'au, but they had to do some cutbacks and he had to find another job. She said, "Now we share the same musicians and entertainers with the Marriott next door. So if you miss a lu'au here some night, you can just go next door to the Marriott and see it on Wednesday or Saturday night."
Also, the concierges at the hotel were wonderful with us, as well. Each tower had their own concierges and the first night we met the afternoon and evening concierge, Rick, who was just great with us. We told him that we knew their object was to keep people on the property, but we were the adventurous types who liked to try the local fare. He was overly helpful with his suggestions. And each of them were spot on good.
All in all, the Hilton Waikoloa Village was a nice place to spend some time while we were on vacation. We weren't in the rooms all that much, but the decor was very nice, the beds were comfy and the room was sort of big. And the staff all treated us extremely well during our visit. The only downside I'd have to say is the place can get overrun with children and it's sometime difficult to find a quiet area to enjoy a book or to take a nap by the ocean. The grounds are beautiful and well-maintained. There were exotic birds in the lobby and in the lagoon area of the Ocean tower. They had a number of places to shop at on the property. They had a spa. But like a lot of Hawaii, nearly everything involved with the hotel is expensive. The room we stayed in would normally run about $429 a night. And our incidentals (breakfast, bar tabs, other charges) came to an additional $700 bucks over six days. Like I said, it was very nice, but there's no way we'd be able to afford to stay there had we not had the free points.
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