Hilton Grand Vacations Club Kohala Suites Waikoloa — Hotel in Hawaii

We stayed at the Hilton Grand Vacations Club Kohala Suites for one week in August. We were a party of 6 and stayed and started our trip in a ground level suite. ||||I’ll start with the good. The layout of the rooms are nice. Having a full kitchen was great. We stopped at Costco on the way in and made many meals in the room. We shared a room with my parents who had the master room and my husband and our 2 kids were in the 2nd bedroom that had two full beds. It was enough room and worked out well for us. ||||The convenience of hopping on the shuttle to the main property was great. Our kids (11 and 9) loved swimming at the lagoon and using the water slides. ||||Now for the bad… the rooms are dated and not very clean. The couch was quite dingy and dirty. Many of the bathroom towels had stains on them. The biggest negative was discovering German roaches at 4am on our first morning while making my coffee. I had read about roaches being an issue in hotels on the island while researching our trip. With that in mind, I came with 10 Max sticky traps. I didn’t even think to put them down until finding the first roach. After the early am German roach spotting, I laid the sticky traps all over the kitchen and under the sink (an area where roaches are notorious for hanging out) where the trash was located. Within an hour the traps had multiple German roaches on them. 🤢||||Knowing German roaches are the infesting/ disease carrying, worst kind of roach you can deal with I took my pics to the front desk. I have a background in hospitality and realize these things happen but also wasn’t willing to risk staying in that room and having German roaches infiltrate our luggage. The front desk person was unphased by my reporting of German roaches in the room and stated they could come in and spray with a non toxic pesticide. I explained that wasn’t an option since I have auto immune and my son has asthma and spraying a pesticide in a room we were currently in was not an option. I explained based on the amount of German roaches we saw in such a short amount of time indicated a serious infestation and the only suitable option was to move us to an upper level unit. Again working in hospitality, I know being on an upper level, corner unit would decrease our odds of an infestation there. I asked if she could accolade that request and she said “possibly” but it wouldn’t happen that day since they were completely sold out. She said the soonest we could move was the next am but to check back with her the next am to confirm. We stayed another night and made sure to keep the kitchen spotless and stored all foods even dry in the fridge. The next am, I check in with the same front desk person to confirm we could move. She said she had a upper, corner unit but that we would have to have our whole place packed and be out of the room by 10 am, mind you I was talking to her at 9am. She gave me two large plastic boxes to carry to my room and said to pack all our food in it and bring all our luggage and food to front desk and store it until our room was ready, sometime around 4. So we would be completely without a room for hours. At this point I was thinking it seemed like an unreasonable ask considering we were dealing with an infestation but I went back to our room to explain the situation to my husband and parents. My mom was not as understanding as me 😂 and she went to talk to same front desk agent I was dealing with. My mom told her we were not clearing out our room until the new room was ready. And asked that the new room we were to move to be put as a priority for cleaning so we could get in there ASAP. We received definite push back from the front desk agent who said housekeeping has their priorities and they need us out of our current room by 10am and it wasn’t an option to do what my mom was asking and that our new room would be ready by 4pm. Me being the “good cop” calmly asked her what was a bigger priority than accommodating a guest who has a room that’s infested with German coaches? While we couldn’t wait to get out of the current room, it just wasn’t possible to do it in 45 mins and the biggest thing we wanted was the room we were suppose to move to, to be put on housekeepings cleaning list as a priority. The front desk agent reluctantly went to back and then came back and said they would “accommodate” our request and we could have more time to pack and they would make our new room a priority to clean once the current people in there checked out. ||||My husband and mom took our kids to the lagoon to hangout while my dad and I packed up the whole kitchen and the rest of our belongings carefully shaking everything to make sure we didn’t bring any hitchhikers to the next room. Again, German roaches are notorious for hitchhiking. ||||We were packed up completely by 11 and waited for the call to move to new room. We finally got it by 1pm and moved right after with the help of a very nice employee. ||||I made sure to check for signs of cockroaches in the new place but didn’t see any initial signs anywhere. I did see some mouse droppings under the sink in the back but seriously at this point all I cared about were being somewhere without roaches. The mice poop didn’t even phase me 😂. ||||I laid down the rest of the sticky traps I had in the new kitchen in same places as before and I’m happy to report we never caught any roaches in this room. 🙌🏼||||We waisted the majority of one day packing and unpacking. It was such a pain in the butt but worth in the end to be in a room that didn’t show signs of German roaches. I still spent the rest of the trip worrying about them in our stuff and came home and did a whole process to make sure we didn’t bring any hitchhikers in our home. I had to unpack everything outside, closely inspecting and shaking. Everything was kept outside until I could wash and dry it. ||||It’s been a month and I’m still a little paranoid we brought German roaches home 🤪. I have put traps down here just in case and nothing has been caught so hoping we are in the clear. 🙏||||So all in all our trip to the big island was great. We lost a chunk of our day dealing with this issue but it worked out. I wouldn’t stay here again though. We did visit the King building and that one looked much newer and cleaner. If we went again I would travel with sticky traps and always request...

Many reasons for my ratings

When I called about a crib for my infant I could not get an answer if there was one available. It seems like an easy math problem to me, since all you have to do is calculate the number of cribs vs the number of people requesting. I was told it was first come first serve, which again doesn’t help since I need to know if I should bring one with me on the plane or if that is one less thing I would need to bring for my family of 5. It’s about convenience and customer service. Also, it’s not peak season so it shouldn’t have been that hard when we asked.

In the room there were cockroaches and wine glasses with lipstick stains on them, might as well toss those since you can’t get it out and it’s just a bad look. There was also no dish soap to wash the dishes.

When booking this reservation, when checking in and during our marketing tour, I specifically asked if we would have access to the pools of all the different Hilton properties around since we were staying at one and of course I was told yes. After packing up my three children and our pool equipment and driving over to Kingsland we were then rejected and told we were given wrong information. I have a 7, 5 and 1 year old so I’m sure you can imagine my disappointment to find that out. It takes a lot of work to even travel 5 minutes down the road with all of them let alone with our pool gear! As a courtesy it would have been beneficial to just let us enjoy the couple hours there, but instead we were told we had no access.

At the pool when requesting towels for our family. We were told that we are supposed to receive them at check in, which we didn’t and that we need to request the from our room, so even though we have our room key and our information we had to go back to the room, request the towels, wait 20-30 minutes and then be given our towels that were already at the front desk which was connected to the pool. I’m sorry, what kind of game are we playing here? I’m already at the pool, just look up our info and give me our towels!

It just seems to me that the staff are very good about telling you what they think you want to hear vs what I actually want to hear, which is the truth. I have three kids and we love going on these trips and having the space, but I need accurate information so I’m not shuffling them around and wasting our time for no reason.

If we do buy a timeshare it most likely wont be with Hilton because of this experience on this trip. It was inconvenient and lacked good customer service. If the tour was more about truth then I could have invested our time and money into it for our future vacations.

Overall the location and space of the rooms and the whole suit are great and needed for our family, we loved the pool and water slide at Kohala and the views and lagoon at Hilton Waikoloa Village, but I’d most likely find another company that will be honest with me and give me the information needed to make my life easier instead of causing...

The room was spacious, clean and fully adequate. Kitchen was well stocked with dishes and cooking equipment. The grounds are nice. The big negative is the pool and barbecues. Small pool with almost no shade around the pool to escape the sun. The hot tub doesn’t have any jets - just an air blower that blows cold air bubbles through some holes. Around the pool were a few lounge chairs without umbrellas and a few tables with chairs (the tables did have umbrellas). To us, the pool is one of the main reasons for visiting- especially the Big Island since there are very few swimmable beaches on the Kona side of the island. This place was a major let down in that department.

It was very frustrating to use the grills because despite the detailed instructions on how to light them, the spark ignitors were broken on all four grills that we tried. You have to talk to the front desk and they have to call maintenance to come light the grills for you. Sometimes we waited more than ten minutes for them to show up. I asked the front desk whether they were planning to fix the grills, but she just asked whether I wanted her to report that they weren’t working!!!! When we travel to Hawaii we always stay in condo-type units. Stop at Costco and the grocery store on the way from the airport, stock up on food and never go out to eat for the week. You can easily save more than a round-trip airfare’s worth of money by doing this instead of dining out for the week. We tend to grill at least one meal a day when visiting.

We were told that we could use the pool at the Hilton hotel so we went there the first day. Definitely a huge pool there including a nice sand-bottom section. However, that pool also had zero shade umbrellas unless you were willing to rent them.

We ended up sneaking into the pool area at the King’s land property - another Hilton vacation complex up the road that seems to be much newer and better kept. They had a great pool complex with comfortable lounge chairs and plenty of shade umbrellas. Really nice but be prepared to be kicked out if you get caught since that property’s facilities are not available to Kohala Suites guests (maybe you can get access if you are an HVGC owner but I don’t know). I did check a couple of their grills and the ignitors worked fine.

I wouldn’t stay at Kohala Suites again. If I wanted a Hilton condo-type property in the area I wouldn’t hesitate to book at King’s Land but thumbs down to Kohala Suites. If you don’t care about a nice pool and grills that work, then Kohala Suites would...