1 Hotel Hanalei Bay

I'll start with the great things about this hotel. 1.) the grounds and the views 2.) the music 3.) the pool & beach staff We would never recommend this hotel and we will not be back. -I called the hotel a few times about 10 days before our trip and couldn't reach the concierge so I left a message letting them know that I was interested in setting up some activities. I never heard back from anyone. -Basically, from the moment you arrive, you get the feeling that the employees don't like the tourists. Don't expect an experience like the Ritz Carlton or The Four Seasons. It's not even close.......1 Hotel is not a great experience in hospitality, service or dining. -Upon arrival at 2:45pm, we were told our room was not ready. We had traveled over 10 hours, so to hear we couldn't get in our room was very disappointing. -While waiting for our room to be ready, we had lunch at their main restaurant and couldn't even eat the food because it was so dried out and bland. -We received a text message telling us our room was ready and to click the link for our key. The link simply sent us to their website. We walked back to the lobby, our luggage had been taken to the room already. so nobody walked us to our room, there was no information given about the hotel. She simply pointed and said, "turn right, then left, then go through a door down the hall to find your room," As we went in search of our room, we noticed that other guests were also lost and uniformed. -There's a coffee machine in the room but there wasn't any cream. I phoned to ask for cream which arrived over an hour later. They must be very short staffed because that was our experience anytime we needed anything in our room. -We tried a few meals on property and the food was so bad that we went off property to eat for the rest of our trip. Don't waste your money here, you'll be disappointed.

Had a great experience in the spa, super nice atmosphere and my massage therapist, Wanda was absolutely exceptional, would recommend to anyone

I had a massage with Wanda. She was absolute magic. I have chronic tension in my back and she was able to release it like no other. I saw her 2x in a weekend! She was incredible!

My wife and I just returned from a 5 night stay at 1Hotel Hanalei Bay. She arrived 1 day early and I caught up with her on our 2nd day due to my work schedule. We rented a car which is a must when staying at this property, as it is about 45 minutes away from the airport and you are going to want to get off the property to be able to enjoy what the island has to offer. Even if you don’t want to venture far, having a car gives you the option to freely make the 10 minute drive into Hanalei to try some of the coffee shops, shave ice shops, or restaurants. This is not the type of hotel where you are just going to want to stay on property for your entire stay because there is so much natural beauty on the island and it would be a shame to not explore as much of it as is appropriate for the type of trip you are looking to have. There are plenty of hikes as well as remote beaches on the north shore that 1Hotel Hanalei Bay guests should absolutely check out. Also, there are only two (expensive) dinner options at the hotel (we only tried 1Kitchen, as the Welina Terrace had primarily raw items on the menu and we skipped it due to my wife being pregnant), so it is best to get off property to try dining options away from the hotel. 1Hotel Hanalei Bay is set on the northern part of the island which is about a 45 minute drive from the airport. My wife picked up our rental car and drove herself there, while I pre-arranged for an uber and I got there that way. The biggest thing to make note of for first time visitors to Kauai is the weather on the north shore of the island. During our 5 nights at the property, we experienced 2 nearly full days of rain and overcast skies, while the other days had varying levels of intermittent showers. Personally, we do not intend to return to the island during this time of year again due to the weather risks. The best thing that 1Hotel Hanalei Bay has to offer is its expansive view of Hanalei Bay, but on the days where it was raining and extremely cloudy we didn’t even get to enjoy these views, so that was certainly a let down. On the days when the weather cleared up a bit, the view was in fact as spectacular as all the pictures we had seen before and was the highlight of the trip for us. I think going in I knew there could be some weather concerns, but I didn’t think that it could essentially wipe out an entire day of comfortable beach/pool time. Check in/Arrival Arriving at LIH airport is easy, it’s a small terminal with just 10 gates. My wife caught the short shuttle over to the rental car center and grabbed her car. I was able to catch my Uber just outside of the terminal. The drive to Hanalei took about 45 minutes with some of the ride including scenic oceans views, while some of it was through lush sections of vegetation. Once you make your way into Princeville there are a bunch of houses and condos you’ll pass by as well as a golf course, a restaurant or two, some tennis and pickleball courts, and then towards the end of the area is the 1Hotel. My wife was checked in at the front desk and was given a quick tour of the main features of the property. The gym, spa, dining, and boutique are all in the same central area of the resort and she was shown these areas and then taken to our room. By the time I arrived she had already been there for 1 night, so she met me at the front and we made our way to our room. Room We were in room 415 which I’m not entirely sure of the room category, but it had an ocean view. Upon arrival my wife was informed that we were in fact upgraded from the mountain view room that we booked by booking through our helpful travel agent. The room we had was nicely decorated and felt fresh, but there was nothing special about it. There was a couch and sitting area, king bed, and the bathroom with a rain shower. The interior of the shower had volcanic rocks on it which we enjoyed. One of the weak points of 1Hotel Hanalei Bay is definitely the rooms. We have actually never stayed at a beach/island resort that was made up of a block of rooms so densely packed like this. Sensei Lanai was similarly setup, but we found the rooms there more spacious and spread out, although they were in one big building block. That being said, there was nothing about the room at this resort that would draw visitors to book because of the room. Service The service at 1Hotel Hanalei Bay left a lot to be desired and was a disappointing aspect of our stay. We came in with expectations of a 5 star setting with fresh, 5 star bones, decor, and amenities at the resort (having opened in 2023) with 4 star service. The first two points ended up being true, the setting is truly spectacular and the resort itself is modern with excellent facilities, but in our opinion, the service landed more in the 1-2 star range, often times you couldn’t even really grade the service because requests were just completely ignored. A few examples where we experienced poor/slow service are as follows. At the pool on my first day at the resort, my wife suggested that we order some lunch, so I said once the server came around that we would place our order. After waiting 15-20 minutes with no one appearing, we walked over to the bar to place a food order. After we ordered, I pointed the bartender to where our seats were so that they could deliver the food over to us. He said oh no you have to come and get it, we don’t bring it to you if you order over here, you can come back in 15-20 minutes and grab it. We ordered a starter and an entree each, so it was quite a bit of food so I joked and said okay perfect I’ll have my pregnant wife swim across the pool to retrieve her food. He said oh no, you can just walk around the pool, clearly not catching my sarcasm. I ended up retrieving the food which was 4 to go bento boxes stacked high, not exactly a luxurious or service forward start to our trip. Due to the time change, we were up most mornings very early, but unfortunately on my first morning after eating both lunch and dinner on property I woke up with violent food poisoning which kept me in bed the majority of the morning. A highly disappointing start to my trip. The resort’s response was adequate at the time, they provided me with some medicine to alleviate my symptoms and offered to remove our dinner charge from that day, which now after reviewing the folio in my email it was not removed and I didn’t catch it as I was on property because the folio was overwhelming to look at and make sure everything was accounted for. I ended up requesting an IV appointment to hopefully feel better, so we went to the spa at 1:30pm and scheduled a 2pm IV appointment. My wife was hungry so we went to 1Kitchen for her to grab a bite to eat while I was receiving the IV, while I waited for my appointment I sat down with her and I ordered a ginger ale which I assumed would be delivered at some point in the 30 minutes between when we sat down at 1Kitchen and when my IV appointment was. By 1:55pm my ginger ale hadn’t arrived and I wasn’t able to locate the server to inform him to cancel my order because I had to leave, so my wife ended up cancelling the order once he finally returned. She ended up eating her light lunch and sure enough, he brought the bill with the ginger ale on it and it took 20 minutes to rectify this issue, then she finally met me in the Vitality Kauai area of the spa while I received my IV treatment. Another instance when we received poor service was when we misplaced our refillable bottles that were provided to us upon check in and we called to request 2 more of these to keep refilling during our stay. They brought 2 large glass Aqua Panna waters as well as a bill for $35. We called and pointed out their mistake and requested that we be brought 2 new refillable bottles. They said they’d remove the charge for the Aqua Panna and would bring the refillable bottles, but then they never brought the refillable waters even after asking again via the concierge chat. We forgot we even requested them multiple times once we realized hours later that they never arrived. The service at 1Kitchen for both breakfast and dinner was incredibly slowly during all of our meals there. My wife and I often would look at each other and say “did they forget we were dining here?” I am all for being on island time and having a relaxed, laid back vibe to service, but 1Hotel Hanalei Bay takes this to the extreme to the point that it sometimes doesn’t even feel like there is any effort being made. I will give credit to Clarissa who helped us during our dinner at 1Kitchen, she was very helpful and service oriented. Matthew was very friendly and helpful as well with prompt and attentive service for breakfast. Upon checkout my wife texted in the concierge chat about 20 minutes before we intended to leave our room to give a buffer to request our car. We had plans to make a stop at the boutique as well as check the final bill, so we figured requesting 20 minutes before we left our room, plus expecting at least 10 minutes to complete our other tasks before leaving would have it so the car was waiting for us out front. The concierge never responded to our initial text, so I had my wife double text them to confirm the car would be there. I bought a hat at the boutique and then I reviewed the bill for 15 minutes, so then we thought surely after all this time the car would be waiting out front. We went to check with one of the valet attendants to confirm that our car was in fact on the way, as we expected it to be based on our texts to the concierge (also this had worked out whole trip so we didn’t think we needed to call as well), they asked for our last name and they dug through the bucket with keys with our last initial on it and they pulled out our key and said the car would be up shortly. They hadn’t even started the process of retrieving our car. I was careful to check the bill because I knew this resort had not demonstrated a detail oriented approach throughout our stay, and sure enough there was a double charge for our lunch on one of our days at the pool. I asked the front desk attendant to check what the charges were and they said this was from when you guys ordered 5 margaritas. I noted that I was with my pregnant wife and I don’t drink, thus we had no alcohol the whole trip. They removed that charge. Then I also noticed a double lunch charge where it said we ate lunch both at the pool and at 1Kitchen. I asked the attendant to check what this was and he said they accidentally charged our breakfast buffet as a lunch charge. So that was not $150 worth of margaritas and $144 worth of included breakfast charges I had to go line by line to eliminate from our bill. Now upon leaving the resort I noticed that they doubled up a $120 in room dining charge to which ate up a part of our $500 resort credit. I did not catch this at our time of checkout unfortunately. All in all, we went in with lower expectations for prompt service, but even so, we walked away with being severely underwhelmed in this area. It’s one thing to care and just not have the capacity or training to get things done on a resort level in a timely fashion, but it’s another thing to just show zero interest in enhancing guests’ experiences through the service side of things. Our baseline for service is based off of our North American beach/island resorts which we have stayed at in the past 4 years in the following order: Como Parrot Cay, Rosewood Mayakoba, One&Only Mandarina, Sensei Lanai, and Rosewood Mandarina. Ironically, the room at 1Hotel Hanalei Bay was the most expensive amongst these 6 stays and the service was far and away worst amongst these. Again, our intention was to temper expectations in this area which we thought we did to an extent, but some of the things that we dealt with were unacceptable at this price point. I suppose if this is a once in a lifetime stay for travelers who typically don’t choose 5 star resorts then those individuals may not notice a difference. That’s not to say that we are extremely discerning, but we have enjoyed all of our 5 star beach resort stays and never walked away with the level of letdown we had from this stay. We are not overly fussy travelers and are plenty self sufficient, but when on vacation we just have higher expectations for the attitude and urgency of a resort as a whole to aim add value to a guest’s experience while on property, rather than to consistently be unable to execute. Activities With this being our babymoon, we did not plan to participate in a ton of activities, but we drove west down Kuhio Highway to check out Tunnels Beach which was an excellent spot to spend an afternoon. We rented beach chairs in Hanalei, grabbed a few snacks (and my wife a poncho for the rain), and enjoyed our time at this beach a lot. I spent some time swimming in the water and even when it lightly rained, we still enjoyed just being on a quiet beach in a special part of the world. Other than that outing, the only other activity that we did was I went snorkeling just off the beach at the hotel. There was a reef which left the coral just a few feet below the surface of the water during low tide, which I think the resort needs to do a better job of protecting because there guests that would walk out quite far amongst the coral which I believe is not good for the health of it. That being said, there was a deep sandy channel which was the perfect path out to some excellent snorkeling. I really enjoyed the colorful fish I was able to see, especially when I would check in the crevices for the fish that might be hiding. After about 15 minutes of making my way down the sandy channel and checking each crevice, I spotted 2 green sea turtles minding their business devouring some algae. I treaded water for a while and one swam off about 5 minutes later, but the 2nd one stayed in the same general area for about 30 minutes and never even paid any attention me as I observed it. It even moved across the channel to find more food on the other side of the rocky channel and it nearly bumped right into me. Kauai seems to have plenty of other awesome activities to do, but those weren’t in the cards for us on this particular trip. Dining The dining at 1Hotel Hanalei Bay was subpar in our experience. We did not try Welina Terrace because my wife is avoiding raw fish during pregnancy. We had breakfast everyday at 1Kitchen. We had lunch at the pool twice, once in town at Big Nick’s, and once at Nourish Hanalei on our way to the airport. We ate 2 dinners from room service, 1 dinner at 1Kitchen, and 1 dinner in town at The Terrace. We found the breakfast buffet that was offered through our rate to be okay, the omelette station was nice, as I got a custom omelette with Portuguese sausage, spinach, and mushrooms each day. There were plenty of traditional breakfast dishes at the buffet like scrambled eggs, potatoes, sausage, bacon, etc., as well as a few types Asian dumplings per day, various pastries and danishes, a very limited fresh fruit selection, breads and bagels, yogurts and puddings, and oatmeal. I may be forgetting some items, but this was not a standout meal for us to start our mornings. For lunches we ate at the pool a few times, ordering the Kauai grown salad, ahi tuna sandwich, chips and guacamole, shrimp tacos, BBQ chicken pizza, and kid’s menu chicken tenders. These dishes were all adequate, but nothing stood out. Lunch in town at Big Nick’s was our favorite lunch where my wife tried the combo plate with coconut shrimp, teriyaki beef, and teriyaki chicken served over rice. I tried the chicken teriyaki plate. Finally, we enjoyed açaí bowls as well as a Thai chicken wrap at Nourish Hanalei which we highly recommend. We also tried shave ices from Wishing Well in Hanalei which were excellent. Our dinners from room service included ordering the kale Caesar, burger, and sourdough rolls. For our dinner at 1Kitchen we tried the sourdough rolls again which were excellent, as well as the arancini, arugula and feta salad, seafood skewer, and spicy crab rigatoni. This meal was extremely overpriced for the quality of food, but the arugula salad and spicy crab rigatoni stood out for us as above average dishes. Lastly, we enjoyed our best meal of the trip off property at The Terrace restaurant. We loved their coconut shrimp appetizer, grilled romaine Caesar, as well as our entrees which were the seafood curry and mahi mahi/tiger shrimp. In summary, the dining experience was disappointing at 1Hotel Hanalei Bay, particularly the food poisoning incident after my first night on property. I heard from multiple staff members that this was not the first time someone contracted food poisoning on property. Location/Facilities The location and facilities is an area in which this resort truly stands out. The setting and view from the resort is jaw dropping as you look out across Hanalei Bay. The mountain and ocean combination is just about as good as it gets. The access to areas around the island to explore beaches, do hikes, among plenty of other activities is a strong suit of this property. The facilities are also very impressive. The adults only pool is small, but we enjoyed some time there and the view from it is excellent. The main pool area is a great area (although we wish the pool was a few degrees warmer, especially when there was overcast weather). The ability to go from the pool area directly to Puu Poa Beach is a real treat and we enjoyed being able to move back and forth between these two areas. I did not check out the spa facilities, but my wife received what she said excellent maternity massage and she said the facilities were good including the sauna and steam room. The gym was the best hotel gym I’ve ever seen with every piece of cardio equipment (treadmills including a Woodway, stairmaster, rowers, peloton, ellipticals, seated bikes, assault bikes, and ski ergs), plenty of machine weights, multiple squat racks, a turf for pushing sleds back and forth, boxes for box jumps, two full sets of dumbbells, and plenty more. Any kind of workout you want to do can absolutely get done at their gym. Overall In our experience, from a hospitality standpoint, 1Hotel Hanalei Bay falls short of a luxury experience. That being said, we ultimately enjoyed our time on the island and realize that other than renting a house this is likely the best place to stay. The setting is unique and special and is absolutely worth visiting. My personal recommendation is not to visiting during February when we did as it really is random chance on the weather. We had 2 full days of sun and intermittent showers which allowed us to spend plenty of time outside at the pool and beach and to enjoy the amazing view of the bay. We also had basically 2 full days that were completely overcast and the pool just wasn’t warm enough to keep us outside, so we ended up spending a good chunk of those days in our room, although we did get out and drive into Hanalei on those days and didn’t let weather completely ruin our trip, there is definitely a risk when visiting the north shore of Kauai during February from our experience. This is an amazing part of and deserves to be visited, I just think it would be better enjoyed if you can luck out with some clearer days. It also deserves to have an excellent 5 star hotel to match that setting, but 1Hotel Hanalei Bay is not that, especially for where it is positioned price wise. Ultimately we had a great tume on Kauai and are glad we visited this island for this trip at 1Hotel Hanalei Bay despite its shortcomings, but that was entirely due to our resourcefulness and adaptability to find ways to maximize the trip and not anything of the resort’s doing.

Connor is terrible and place sucks do not go