Jet Ski Maui — Attraction in Maui

I don’t usually write bad reviews but when I do it’s because I feel that people really need to be warned about something.

I’ve been jet skiing many, many times and know how to handle myself. I took my wife and daughter to go jet skiing at Jet Ski Maui aka Pacific Jet Sports (same company) near Lahaina, as this is the only place on Maui to do it. To say the least it was an incredibly frustrating experience and I will never go there again. Here’s why.

Jet Ski Maui controls almost your entire experience with a GPS system from where you can go, to how fast you can go, and believe me it’s very limiting. You are only allowed to ride in an area the size of a triangle that’s about a few hundred yards on each side. If you venture outside of the triangle, if you come within 100 feet of the launch dock, or if you come within 300 feet of another rider, then they use GPS to automatically throttle you down to 5 to 10 mph and in some cases your machine will shut off.

Now if you can avoid all of that, you might be ok. However, there were several times when I was 100% not violating those rules and my jet ski wouldn’t get past 10mph. Essentially it was just stop and go and stop and go, hardly a fun experience.

The biggest problem (besides providing misinformation) is that they have too many people riding the jet skis at one time and the more riders, the more you’re going to be doing the stop and go pattern. When we arrived there were already about 15 riders out there in a relatively small area. So adding us, that’s about 17 jet skis trying to maintain the 300/100 foot rules and not go out of bounds. This is clearly impossible with so many riders. We were there during non peak hours and they had almost all of their jet skis out there, so I can’t imagine what it would be like during peak hours.

I was also told by the photographer that I had to maintain a distance of 30 feet between the jet ski and the launch dock. But it turns out that he was wrong and it’s actually 100 feet. Then he told my daughter at the end of her session that it was 20 feet. Well I can assure you it’s not 20 or 30 feet because I tested it while we were having our photos taken and the other employees said so. I also read a response to one of their Google reviews from 2 months ago where the company says the distance between jet skis is 100 feet. This is after 4 different people told me it is 300 feet. Get your story straight people.

Btw, I was also told by one of the employees that they didn’t use to throttle people, but some girl broke her leg the previous year so they started doing it. But just because it’s safer doesn’t make it fun. If you’ve never ridden before, you may get very frustrated. If you’re an experienced rider or if you’ve ridden just a couple times, you are probably not going to enjoy this at all.

The company should be, at a minimum, setting expectations about the safety and environmental issues and not waiting until after you’ve already paid. In my opinion this is simple dishonesty. And by the way, nobody took a look at my jet ski to see why it was shutting down when I wasn’t violating any rules. Nobody offered me any kind of a refund, discount or any other solution. All they did was blame me.

Don’t waste your money with this place....

If the kids didn't have fun, this would been a zero-star experience.

For those of you thinking about doing this, be aware that the total time dedicated to this event is about 4 hours instead of the hour as advertised.

I did not expect to spend a 1/2 day on the kids riding a jet-ski for 45 minutes. This could not have been a worse time commitment for the price. A better way to think about the cost of this event is spending the $200 + 1/2 day of the total cost of your vacation.

I would have preferred the person checking us in to be more upfront about the round-trip time. We would have made a different decision as a result. Hopefully this helps whoever reads this to make a more informed decision...

Amazing time, would give 5/5 but one of the employees was impatient and rude when we were coming back in. He assumed we were told things that we weren't and generally didn't seem to tolerate people who have never jet skied before. I would expect that if someone can't tolerate people, they should get another job. Except for this one person, it was great time, everyone was friendly, and it was a fantastic time....