Location, location, location. Across from the beach and easy walk to most everything on the main strip of Waikiki (Kalākaua Avenue), the location is hard to beat. It also sits atop a good coffee shop (Kai Coffee) with friendly staff. That’s the pro.

This hotel shows up as “5-star hotel” in Google search, but it’s far from it. When I think of 5-star hotels I think of some of the Four Seasons or Ritz Carlton Hotels, where you’re taken care of down to your personal preferences and you don’t have to worry about anything.

My husband is allergic to dust mites, and although he usually doesn’t have much trouble in a well cleaned/maintained hotel, I usually request hypoallergenic foam pillows (saying “if they’re available”). I noted that in the reservation, but that was at first ignored. Only after third time of asking, we got the answer (“yes we have foam pillows”) and the pillows.

We got the deluxe ocean view room. When we first arrived, the AC fan was really clunky and loud (like something was stuck), to the point where we had to turn it off in order to sleep. My husband had mild allergic reactions after the first night. It got slightly better after some additional cleaning and filter change, but he was still sniffly and we still turned off the AC at night due to noise.

I understand the room can be small by the ocean, but the bathroom size was another level - it was really cramped (like the door could almost hit the toilet), and it really wasn’t well thought out. For example, it was one of those showers where it was half open/half shielded by glass, but the glass part didn’t extend enough, so every time we took a shower, water would seep out to the floor and soaked the bathmat. This was really annoying, especially in this age of not-everyday housekeeping.

Other little things are like not having enough/high enough towel bars to hang 2 bath towels. It’s a room for 2 people, but there’s just one (strangely low) towel hook on the back of the door, but the only other towel bar is right above the toilet tank and just high enough for face towel, so there’s really no place to hang the 2nd bath towel anywhere.

I also had to ask for another iron because the one in the room was broken and didn’t produce steam, but the 2nd one that they brought was also broken and started sputtering out black flakes, so I just gave up after that.

The coffee machine in the room came with unbranded pods, which is fine, except they were unmarked so we had no idea which was regular/decaf.

When I’ve stayed at well maintained hotels, they’d have clear maintenance schedules for small equipment in the rooms too, like irons, coffee machines or hair drier - it didn’t seem like the case here.

The person at the front desk who checked us in (Mata?) was really nice & she tried to be helpful in getting our room ready.

The view from the room was nice. As with many hotels, the front lobby is a lot more impressive than actual rooms. Compared to a lot of other hotels, though, there’s not a lot of room in the lobby to sit around/meet with people.

The infinity pool, while it offers a nice view at sunset, is pretty small, and how they present the pictures of the cabanas is a bit misleading. They make it seem like the cabanas for rent are right by the pool, but the pool area is on one level, and the cabanas are on the other side of the roof area (5th floor so not like top of the building) that’s one step down among the buildings, so it’s not like you have any view of the pool (or the ocean) from the cabanas.

We went during the Christmas time and they were running some big package deals for the cabanas (it was like $650 for cabanas + food/drink?), so we didn’t feel like that was worth it for us. At normal times, I think it’s $150 to rent but there’s a $100 minimum bar order.

We did enjoy the view. Rather than being on the beach your room is right on Kalākaua Ave though, so if you usually live in a quiet place, you should prepare yourself for some street noise. Our room was on 11th floor so it wasn’t too bad, but I’d imagine it could be worse for lower floors.