| Wailea/Makena | Kapalua | Ka'anapali | Lana'i |
Wailea Resort, the Makena Resort and its Maui Prince Hotel should be considered together for the purpose of vacation planning. Wailea Resort/Makena is such a strong resort attraction on Maui because of:
The Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea offers quiet, relaxing luxury, and a self-contained feeling within the Wailea resort, apart from the comings and goings, hustle and bustle of a resort and its beachfront that usually are very busy. The Four Seasons has two of the best restaurants on the island, Ferraro’s and Spago, and the Pacific Grill is another winner for breakfast, lunch and nighttime relaxation.
The Fairmont Kea Lani (means "white heaven”) Hotel Suites & Villas provides beautifully designed 22 acres fronting another favorite beach, Polo Beach. The Kea Lani features 413 one-bedroom suites with private lanais and 37 secluded one-, two- or three-bedroom villas with private garden sun decks and pools. For good reasons the design reminds you of Las Hadas in Mexico but everything about the atmosphere and operation of the hotel reflects unpretentious Hawaiian elegance and indulgence that, like other Wailea properties, also is family-oriented.
Perhaps not the best known but certainly one of the most popular resorts, the Renaissance Wailea Beach Resort is appreciated for its more intimate, low-key, uncrowded atmosphere and lush 15-acre environment around the hotel that faces one of Maui’s best beach fronts, Mokapu, and a series of small coves. In addition to the U-shaped hotel, the 2-story Mokapu Beach Club near the beach provides additional luxury, privacy and amenities.
The interior and 40-acre exterior of the Grand Wailea Resort Hotel and Spa Maui intentionally was designed for grandeur and luxury, but in an elegant and serene rather than ostentatious way. The two centerpieces between the hotel and the ocean are the stunning New England-style chapel in a lush garden setting and, one level down below the adults pool, a large lagoon playground for adults and children with caves, waterslides, waterfalls, a little beach for toddlers and small children (accompanied by parents), and an extensive grass beachfront. No to be missed is the hotel’s permanent collection of paintings, sculptures, murals and other art work by Hawaiian and internationally renown artists.
Under different names, the Outrigger Resort has gone through a series of reincarnations over the past three decades but still gives the feeling of what the property was like before the Wailea Resort was built around it. The resort’s eight low-rise, unpretentious buildings fit perfectly into the flow of the 22-acres of lawns and gardens. Closest to the oceanfront of any of the Resort’s hotels and with a half- mile of its own oceanfront, the Outrigger is situated between Wailea Beach to the south and Ulua Beach to the north, but does not have its own beach. Thanks to a major renovation a few years ago, the Outrigger now has a larger, more complete water activities area set off on the south side of the hotel and a much more attractive, open-air entrance.
At the junction where Wailea Alanui turns into Makena Alanui, Kaukahi Street heads uphill past the Wailea Blue Golf Course on the left and the Emerald Course on the right to the Diamond Resort. About 300 feet above sea level, the Diamond Resort Hawai‘i has wonderful views of Wailea, Kaho‘olawe and Molokini, but its greatest asset, besides 72 luxurious 1-bedroom suites, is a very quiet tropical setting only ten minutes from Wailea Beach. The Diamond Resort offers an excellent resort escape if you don’t insist on beachfront accommodations.
For people who want to get away from it all, have a great hotel and beach but not be in the midst of the action at Wailea Resort, the Maui Prince Hotel in Makena is the place to stay. The hotel fronts on one of our favorite beaches on Maui, Maluaka Beach, a 500-foot stretch of beautiful soft sand that also provides excellent snorkeling. The hotel’s four restaurants – Prince Court, Hakone, Café Kiowai, and Makena Clubhouse – can take care of your dining needs when you don’t want to leave the resort for breakfast, lunch or dinner.
Dotted between Wailea's beach resorts are six neighboring condominium villages collectively called Destination Resorts. These ocean and garden view apartments range in size from studios to three bedrooms as well as villas. Destination Hotels & Resorts books these condos including Makena Surf and the Polo Beach Club, both of which are situated on wonderful beaches.
All of Wailea’s hotels cater to families with children. They all have special programs, classes, lessons, water sports, and other activities for children of different ages. The Four Seasons, for example, has a “Kids for all Seasons” program (children 5-12) that provides lessons in hula and lei-making, art, games, crafts and other activities in and out of the lagoon pool. The Wailea Marriott has a “Cowabunga Kid’s Club” that also is equipped with computers. The Grand Wailea Resort during the day looks like a kid’s camp at the huge lagoon and waterslides. Check with the hotels to see which one might be offering more of the kind of activities that are best suited to your children.
Marriott Wailea Resort – KEIKI CLUB GECKO activities include lei-making, hula dancing, sandcastle building, swimming and pool games, and making Hawaiian arts and crafts. Ages 5-12, 9am - 3pm, Tues., Thurs. and Sat.
Four Seasons Resort - KIDS FOR ALL SEASONS offers hula classes, Hawaiian songs, flower lei-making lessons, Hawaiian legends, story-telling, arts, crafts and games. Outdoor recreational activities include kite flying, swimming, and other fun. Ages 5-12, 9am - 5pm daily. For ages 12 and up, the program offers complimentary scuba clinics, swimming lessons, snorkeling and whale-watching cruises.
Kea Lani Hotel, Suites and Villas - KEIKI LANI emphasizes Hawaiian culture and the ecosystems of Hawaii. Activities include learning about animals that live in Maui's tide pools and the ocean, lei-making, tapa printing, hula dancing and playing Hawaiian games. Ages 5-12, 9am - 3pm, daily.
Renaissance Wailea Beach Resort - CAMP WAlLEA features nature hikes, island crafts, hula lessons, coral reef tours, whale-watching classes, traditional story telling and field trips. Ages 5-12, 9am - 1pm daily except Wed. and Sun. For children under the age of 5, the Renaissance Wailea Beach Resort offers baby-sitting services through the concierge.
Maui Prince Hotel at Makena Resort - PRINCE KIDS CLUB allows children to meet friends from other parts of the world and to share fun activities such as bamboo pole fishing, sandcastle building, swimming, making Hawaiian arts and crafts, and participating in treasure hunts. Ages 5-12, 9am - 4pm, Mon - Sat.
Spa treatments have been around for centuries, but the spas of Maui and Hawaii have elevated spa treatments to splendid self-indulgences with almost as much focus on renewing the spirit and awakening all senses as improving skin and fitness.
Maui arguably can claim the spa and massage therapy titles of the Hawaiian Islands. Each resort on Maui has its special treatments, technologies and techniques, seaweed wraps, Hawaiian lomi-lomi massages, detoxification and fitness rituals, hikes and jogs combined with exercise programs and, of course, manicures, pedicures, hair care and facials. The oils and other materials used in massage, body scrubs, facial masks and other spa treatments include traditional and increasing exotic ones including alaea (local red clay), volcanic ash, kukui nut oil, and Big Island vanilla beans.
Spa “experiences” are extraordinarily diverse. Spas offer more than a dozen types of massage that are mixed and customized according to your needs and tastes and may be combined with body scrub/wraps, waxing and another dozen facial techniques: European (Swedish & German) strokes, Lomi Lomi massage (often called the “Hula” of massage), heated stones (Hawaii Pohaku) on muscles to induce relaxation, Japanese pressure point treatment to increase blood circulation and energy (Shiatsu), massage applied to “reflex points” in your hands and feet (Reflexology), Deep Tissue or Sports massage, perhaps a hot water body shower, sauna, or other types of baths to relieve muscle pain, stiff muscles, increase blood and lymph circulation, and facials that deep clean, soften skin and remove or reduce lines and wrinkles, and produce other beneficial effects.
Every hotel in the Wailea Resort has a spa and promotes its spa services as one of the most important guest services. The spas on Maui and elsewhere in Hawaii have raised spa pampering to new levels of sophistication and extravagance, including therapies based on traditional Hawaiian healing ingredients and techniques.
Spa Grande, Spa Kea Lani, Spa Four Seasons Resort Maui, Renaissance Wailea’s Wailea Massage and Body Care, the Diamond Resort, and The Outrigger Wailea Resort’s Mandara Spa, that emphasizes international massage techniques -- provide a mix of Hawaiian, European, Japanese, Indian and American techniques for rejuvenation and healing.
Each hotel tries to differentiate its spa with special spa experiences. The Spa at the Four Seasons, for example, offers a signature Mele Wailea massage that blends Swedish, Lomi Lomi, and aromatherapy. The Diamond Spa offers a Japanese/German hydrotherapy “Kurhaus” Health System -- combinations of hot, cold, bath, shower and sauna treatments. From time to time these hotels also promote special programs that package education, treatment, pampering, rooms and meals, for example, the Spa Kea Lani “LifeFest Maui Body and Soul Package”.
The Grand Wailea Resort made a brilliant decision more than a decade ago to build a 50,000-square-foot Spa Grande into the hotel that would strive to surpass all of the competition on Maui and provide tough competition for resorts elsewhere in Hawaii.
From the moment that you enter the luxurious 50,000-square-foot Italian-style palazzo spa of the Grand Wailea, and cross the marble floors in as casual and languid a way as possible beneath the Venetian chandeliers, you should start to feel at least a bit like a princess (princes are welcome, too) on the way to join celebs like Halle Berry (and, guys, John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman) in the Roman-style jacuzzis. Whatever you may have expected, you’ll get more, that is unless you studied the encyclopedic program of treatments at the sign-in desk. Just let yourself be pleasantly surprised.
Offering rejuvenation in total luxury, the Spa Grande is a full-service spa that, in addition to hydrotherapy treatments, has perfected traditional beauty and body treatments, relaxation in a Roman tub or Japanese-style bath, and 11 different types of massages, including aromatherapy, Swedish, Reiki and Shiatsu, plus hair, scalp and facial treatments.
Start with the Terme Wailea Hydrotherapy Circuit, which sounds a bit like electroshock therapy but actually is quite the opposite: water-based treatments that include a marvelous jacuzzi bath; followed by a breathtaking plunge in a cold-water pool; then a steam bath, sauna, or Japanese furo bath where your body slowly simmers in a bubbling 105°F pool; and, finally, totally limp and delightfully helpless, you luxuriate in a waterfall shower. Finished? Oh, no, that was just the beginning. You’re still full of an insidious assortment of toxins that need to be expertly extracted from your now very willing body.
Faced with five mysterious baths for curative soaking, your friendly Spa advisor will help you choose just the right one for your inner and outer needs: moor mud (used for centuries as a therapeutic treatment to detoxify the body that, believe it or not, contains an alchemy of hundreds of herbs, plants, grasses, flowers organic substances, vitamins, minerals and other “stuff” transformed into deep-black mud ideal for treatment of water retention and cellulite as well as muscle pain, arthritis, rheumatism, tension and whatnot); curative limu (seaweed) that, in various forms (bathing and ingestion) imported from exotic South Seas origins (Tongan limu is quite famous), has miraculous properties for longevity, health and vigor; aromatherapy (the properties, scent and use of each oil is a science with a vast literature that fortunately you don’t have to read or understand); papaya enzymes (that besides the metabolic and digestive ones also can do wonders for the skin and body when you soak in them); and not least of all, a concoction of therapeutic Hawaiian herbs, all of which, naturally, has complex stories attached to them.
Any of these baths and soaks then get washed off in multiple water jets that provide another massage to get you and your pores ready for a honey, mango and salt loofah scrub. Since all of this marvelous treatment of your body is supposed to be a prelude to romance or vows (hopefully both), finally the other half of your coupling gets to join you in dual sandalwood body wraps and massages in an ocean-view room. It’s not quite fair for your mate, however, who unfortunately missed out on all of your soaking, scrubbing, titillation of body, scents and soul, but that’s life.
Not to be outdone or at least outclassed, the Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea has introduced Aquacranial Massage and this therapeutic technique has developed a near-cult following. You or a couple slip into titanium-lined wetsuits and a therapist escorts you from the Spa to the beach and into water up to your chest. (This treatment also can be performed in the pool). The therapist (perhaps more than one, even as many as five for the two of you) gently slips an air pillow under your neck, and massages your body while your spine and cranium begin to relax.
The Four Seasons Spa also offers a diversity of other treatments including Hawaiian Lomi lomi, Swedish, aromatherapy, shiatsu, hot stone, herbal wraps, masks, water treatments, rubbing and scrubbing, wet-body options, including a salt glow, dead sea mud masque, French seaweed wrap, and a Vichy shower body scrub. For the ultimate in pampering, combine and of these treatments with an indoor or outdoor massage -- Swedish, Shiatsu, Lomi Lomi (Hawaiian) -- Lomi Pohaku Stone Therapy, sports, reflexology and aromatherapy.
Fortunately you can return to your lovely room for a nap and restore enough hand-eye-body coordination and steady leg movements to dress for dinner and make it respectably to dinner.
The art deco Spa Kea Lani combines Eastern techniques with Western traditions, including choices of Swedish, Shiatsu and Hawaiian Lomi Lomi massages; Ayurvedic and teen facials; specialized hydrotherapy treatments; and Hawaiian Ti-leave aloe cooling wrap (for after-sun exposure). In addition to its nine treatment rooms, the fitness center next door is open 24-hours a day (with a personal trainer available 14 hours a day). No one staying at the Kea Lani has any excuse for neglecting his or her body, looks, health or fitness.
Perhaps with less fanfare, the Renaissance Wailea spoils its guests as much as any Wailea resort with indoors and oceanfront therapeutic massages, including Swedish, Shiatsu, Hawaiian Lomi Lomi, Thai traditional and cranial sacral, herbal body contour wraps, and rejuvenating deep-pore cleansing facials.
The Diamond Resort's men's and women's spas feature open-air facilities with panoramic ocean views. Like the Resort itself, everything about these spas expresses serene, quiet luxury. Relax deeply in Furo tubs or Finnish saunas, body showers (western and Japanese styles) and refresh in a cascading waterfall massage. Couples can have their choice of a variety of massages in the privacy of their room. There’s a lot to say for not having to get up and return from these treatments in a spa to your room.
Each Wailea/Makena hotel offers a variety of wedding (vows and vow renewal) packages that include a wedding coordinator, special places on their grounds for wedding ceremonies, dinner and other amenities: