Fairmont Orchid, Hawaii

Recently stayed here with my wife for 5 nights for a birthday trip. It is about a 30/40 minute drive from the airport. The staff is excellent and welcoming from the moment that you arrive. The rooms are spacious, clean and luxurious. The grounds at this hotel are beautiful. From the private beach to the pool & grotto style hot tub, everything is well kept. They also have two golf courses to choose from. The breakfast buffet is one of the better ones that we've seen while traveling. With an omelette bar, two rows of hot foot, cold food, fruit and dessert bar... they have something for everyone. They have a lounge/bar area on the top floor with live music and a great view of the sunset. Binchotan is a great restaurant. The more "casual" of the two main restaurants but we found their food to be incredible. Brown's Beach House is the nicer of the two and also had excellent food and service. They also have a shuttle service that can drive you a few blocks to a grocery store and other amenities. I'd recommend this hotel to anyone staying on the Big Island!

This was my 4th or 5th trip to the Fairmont Orchid, so I obviously enjoy the resort. What made this trip truly outstanding was a couple exceptional staff members. Elizabeth went above and beyond helping me plan this special trip with my grandchildren and Rose greeted us on arrival to be sure everything was beyond perfect. I will always be grateful to Rose and Elizabeth for their kindness and professionalism!! Due to my grandson's life threatening allergies travel is a challenge, but I will return without reservation to the Orchid. This trip created lifelong memories for my granchildren and thats what it is all about. Thank you!!

The Fairmont is a stunning and relaxing resort. We actually booked a different hotel and cancelled upon check in - as it wasn’t what it was described to be. So we quickly booked a room at the Fairmont and headed over. Our check in took a little over 2 hours because they had trouble finding our last minute reservation, but they comped us some drinks and we got to relax in the beautiful weather outside. Service overall was really great. From breakfast to dinner to drinks by the pool. They give you water bottles upon check in (good quality) we’re really great and they have water stations scattered throughout. Housekeeping was very on top of it, a couple of the days they even cleaned it 2x! Overall, food was decent. Nothing was mind blowing or exceptional. I thought the prices of the drinks/food didn’t quite meet the overall value it should have been though. 2 people eating and drinking (not excessively at all) for 4 days was $2,000 which cost the same amount as the stay. Shoutout to Sherry from the front desk check in for being extremely sweet and Evelyn from the lounge for being so fun to talk to and recommending great drinks. We did the luau on the property as well and that was an AMAZING experience. Everyone did a fantastic job and the food there was actually the best we had the entire time. Moral of the story: the resort is beautiful, the pool area is a good size (a lot of yelling kids playing in the pool when we went though), the rooms were good sizes and nicely updated. Biggest cons: pricing for food and drinks were very high even though it wasn’t the best/didn’t feel it was worth it at a Fairmont. No music at the pool - when kids aren’t yelling it was too quiet, we needed to have something playing on our phones to relax to.

Amazing service and amenities with wonderful beach We had the best time at the Fairmont Orchid with perfect weather and excellent service throughout from the sumptuous breakfast buffet with both western and Asian dishes to the ocean front high end Brown’s featuring Hawaiian flavors. The rooms are clean, modern and spacious. Everyone that works there is always smiling and welcoming. We cannot wait to return to our favorite hotel in Hawaii!

I stayed at the Fairmont Orchid for a romantic week long trip in November, and while I’d normally love to share my thoughts on the grounds, the room, the amenities, how I used the Chase Reserve Edit program to book, etc – but the end of my stay, when checking out, I was shocked to see that there were over ten fraudulent charges billed to my room, ranging from $500 dinners, to multiple breakfasts on the same days that I’d had complimentary breakfasts, to a child’s tee shirt at the onsite boutique (I wasn’t traveling with a child). My suspicion is that someone was using my name and room number during my stay to charge things to my room and the hotel didn’t have safeguards in place to prevent this from happening. Obviously, this is incredibly disconcerting, feels violating, and left a shadow at the end of my experience at the Fairmont Orchid. If I hadn’t been vigilant about reviewing my bill, I would have been charged for over $2,000 of fraudulent activity. The front desk was kind enough to remove the majority of these charges as I checked out, but the final billing that I was charged was still incorrect. I emailed customer service and the concierge requesting to talk to either the GM or head of Guest Services, but it seemed to fall on deaf ears, and I was only contacted by a member of the accounting department, who I had to spend days trading emails with to sort the final incorrect charges. I asked multiple times to speak to someone on the hotel’s management team to understand how something like this could happen (had another person gotten my stay details and just kept charging things to my room – creepy if so; or was this employee error or employee fraud; and how was the hotel looking to safeguard against this going forward?) - no one from the hotel team ever reached out to me, which was really disappointing, and made me feel like as soon as I left the hotel, they couldn’t have cared less about my experience or repeat business.