Hotel Review – Royal Hawaiian Honolulu

Introduction

The only reason why I chose this hotel was because the Sheraton had no award availability. I considered the Hilton but because we were staying 5 nights, it made sense to book Marriott to get the ‘book 4 and get 5th night free’ on award stays. Thus at 60K a night, I spent 240K points for the 5 night stay. I also had to pay $40 in bullshit resort fees a night. While we didn’t park a car overnight, that would have cost another $40 a night.

Getting to hotel

Hawaii had just relaxed COVID restrictions where if you showed proof of vaccination, you didn’t have to take a test 72 hours beforehand. Once we landed, our wait was about 30 minutes to get through the COVID screening. We had booked a rental car for 2 days to check out the North Shore and that’s how we got to the hotel. Uber back to the airport ran about $35.

Checkin

One of my biggest gripes is having to wait a long time at checkin. There were 2 agents helping others and we were probably the 4th in line. What irks me is when you see a 3rd agent typing away on the computer but not helping a guest. These hotels need to learn how to ‘flow to the work.’ And you know they have cameras in the back and so if they saw the line of 5+ parties, hey maybe come out from the office and move the line along. While it was only a ~10 minute wait, I just think it’s an unnecessary wait that starts your vacation off in a sour mood.

Wifi

Wifi was decent. I remember a few instances where Tiktok videos wouldn’t load so I moved to LTE. There was no need to log in or anything, so bring as many devices as you want.

Room

Our garden view room was nothing to write home about. The bathroom was smaller than normal bathrooms. On the first 2 nights, we had an issue where the shower water wouldn’t stay steady. It would go from freezing cold to scolding hot and back and forth like that. On the 3rd morning, I asked to move rooms and the front desk was like, “Well I can’t guarantee you that the new room won’t have the same problem. We’ve had other guests report the same thing. How about I send maintenance?” Pause here and think how absurd this is at a category 7 “luxury collection” hotel. There are no logs of which rooms have had the issue fixed? We’re just going to wait until the guests complain before we fix it? We can’t proactively go around and fix all the other bathrooms since it doesn’t seem like it’s a one-off. Anyway, maintenance came while we went out to lunch and the issue was resolved.

One morning, we had the DND sign up at around 9AM and we told housekeeping to come back later. We left at around 11AM, removing the sign. Housekeeping never came again to clean the room. That sucks when you come back from a day out and the room from A LUXURY COLLECTION is still messy.

Breakfast

I was lowly GOLD so don’t know what the breakfast options were. All I know is on checkin, they gave us a one time use voucher for a set of free pastries.

Pool/Beach

The pool sucks here. It’s the size of a big hot tub. Luckily, we were able to use the Sheraton family pool. However, we couldn’t use the Sheraton nicer infinity pool. I also learned from the employee there that all the chairs get claimed by 6:30AM. They start work at 7AM or so and don’t start tagging the chairs until 9:30AM and even then, the guest gets an hour before their stuff gets removed. Thus, you realistically won’t have access to a pool chair until 10:30AM.

However the private beach is a good size and you can rent 2 chairs and an umbrella for $60 a day.

Conclusion

The location is really the best thing about the hotel; it’s in the heart of Waikiki and the Royal Hawaiian Center is right there. Besides that and the beach, everything else seems to be lacking. I’d recommend the Sheraton instead it’s the same number of points and you get access to the vastly superior infinity pool.

Pictures