Ritz-Carlton Maui The Ritz-Carlton Kapalua occupies fifty-four acres on the northwest coast of Maui in a position that is either the island’s most dramatically sited resort or its most inconveniently located, depending entirely on what you came to Maui for. If you came for championship golf, the finest club lounge views on the island, a…
Sensei Lanai sits fifteen hundred feet above sea level in the highlands of Lanai, set among pine trees and banyan trees and gardens that look and feel nothing like a Hawaiian beach resort because they are not one. The property describes itself as a wellness retreat, which is either a marketing category or a genuine…
Hulopoe Bay is a protected marine preserve. No fishing, no motorised watercraft within the bay boundaries, no development on the shoreline other than the resort on the cliff above it. The beach — white sand on lava rock, shaped into a crescent below the Four Seasons’ terraced structure — is shared with no other property…
Lanai is the smallest inhabited island accessible by commercial aviation in Hawaii and the most privately held piece of Pacific real estate in the world. Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder, purchased the island in 2012 for an estimated $600 million — acquiring approximately ninety-eight percent of it — and has since invested in the two Four…
The Grand Hyatt Kauai sits on the south shore of the island’s most beautiful island at the confluence of everything the Poipu coast offers: consistent sunshine, a direct beach frontage on swimmable sand, grounds of tropical density through which the pools wind in a configuration that has been voted among the finest resort pool complexes…
The view arrives before anything else. Guests checking in at the St. Regis Princeville walk through the lobby toward the check-in desk and find, behind it, Hanalei Bay — the two-mile crescent of water below the cliff, the mountains rising from the far shore with the Napali beginning at their northern edge, and a quality…
Kauai is the oldest of the main Hawaiian Islands and the most visibly geological — the mountains more jagged, the valleys deeper, the rivers more dramatic, the rainfall that creates all of it more present even on the island’s sunny south shore than the sky over Maui’s Wailea coast ever suggests rain is possible. The…
Kauai has no all-inclusive resorts. The island that contains the Napali Coast — sixteen kilometres of thousand-metre cliffs accessible only by water or air — and the Waimea Canyon, and the Hanalei Valley’s taro fields that have been farmed on the same terrain for a thousand years, and three or four beaches that earn descriptions…
Waikiki has dozens of hotels on and near the beach, and most of them are fine — comfortable, well-located, delivering the resort experience that the strip’s infrastructure makes relatively easy to provide. Halekulani is something else. Small by Waikiki standards, positioned at the quieter Diamond Head end of the beach, with a service standard that…
Oahu receives more visitors than any other Hawaiian island, handles the widest range of international flights, and contains both Waikiki — the most famous beach in the Pacific, two miles of sand animated day and night with the energy of a destination that has been popular for over a century — and Ko Olina, a…