Hilton Garden Inn Waikiki Beach — Hotel in Honolulu

Room is a bit small. Desk, if you get one, is pretty small but good enough. You do get a microwave and fairly large refrigerator in the room, which is very nice.

Room 1841 is a corner room that has a very large balcony that faces the mountains to the north and the city to the west of the hotel. There are two windows. The curtains do not "seal" well against these windows and lets in lots of sunlight when the sun comes up. There is a decently sized closet area of the room, but only two small drawers within. There is one more drawer on each side of the bed.

The water pressure in the shower is lacking. It was clean though. The light switches are extremely confusing. There's a switch labeled "master switch" that turns off...some things? The AC vent is all the way across the room opposite the bed and blows towards the door. The entryway and bathroom is frigid, but the area around the bed and TV is extremely warm. The TV itself is not a smart TV, not a huge deal, however the normal cable service itself decides not to work randomly.

The biggest problem of them all, and one that I have spent almost every day battling with the WiFi support company (Blueprint RF) and the property itself for my 11 night stay, is the room has EXTREMELY weak WiFi reception. When the WiFi does connect, it's normal hotel WiFi, so not great. However, I only get 1 or 2 bars maximum across all of my devices (phone, tablet, laptop) inside of my room IF it is strong enough to be found at all. The real kicker is I have an access point in my room. I KNOW it is not working. There are multiple cases open with Blueprint RF because every time I call, they say they'll escalate the case. They call back later (usually at 2-5am HST) saying they've made some changes and tell me to connect again, but I always got the same result. Every time I would call, I would provide one of the 4 different case numbers I was given, but all support personnel acted as if nobody had tried any troubleshooting yet. I mentioned the access point in my room on every single call, but none of them acknowledged the access point in my room was obviously not functioning. Finally, I convinced someone from the front desk to come up to my room to investigate the issue. They send someone from the "engineering" staff to my room, the man observed the issue, and said "there's nothing I can do". I'm traveling for work and NEED WiFi. My personal cell phone hotspot does not work well either unless I leave my phone on the balcony...which I shouldn't have to do when I'm expecting working WiFi at the hotel.

The valet was extremely backed up on both Tuesdays of my stay. I waited on my car for a full 50 minutes one day. You can call the valet desk ahead but that only does any good if they answer the phone... which they don't more often than not. It's priced normally for the location ($55/night) and there aren't any other options around, so there's not really anything anyone can do about that. As a last point, the beds are awfully hard and the doors to the other rooms close unbelievably hard, which is very loud in the room.

Fire alarms sounded in the building around 3am the Sunday morning of my stay. I received texts several days stating the fire alarms were sounding and there were no threats during the time I was at work. They should invest in better fire alarm systems, not air quality monitors that charge innocent people $300 dollars for "smoking" in the room as other reviewers claim. Given my luck with this hotel, all of the other reviews of people being charged for smoking AFTER they checked out, and the fact that my stay is not quite over yet, I can't say I would be surprised if this happens to me as well. Overall, the hotel is less than fine. If you don't plan to spend much time in the room it'll be okay...probably. However, as I'm traveling for work, I prefer to come back to the hotel and relax the rest of the evening. I've been to Oahu plenty of times, and I will be preferring the Hilton Waikiki Beach next time. We branched out and tried something new for this stay, but it did...

Hotel is in an amazing location, across from Target (& other stores + restaurants) and easily walkable to Royal Hawaiian Center & Waikiki Beach. Lots of nice places around it too for food.

That being said — insane bed bug infestation. I was bitten every night on my 4-night stay, with bites in zig-zag & linear formations. Had to go through an insane clean up ritual when I got home, and I'm still unsure if the bugs followed me home.

What I found appalling was the hotel's reaction to bed bugs. They transferred me and my fellow guests to another room, but the manager almost condescendingly asked "You know this is a tropical location right?", and then I stated that I've been to Waikiki before and I also don't swim so I really don't think these were from being in a "tropical area" (that I supposedly was so unaware of when I booked this vacation, huh — odd to me that you would assume your guests thought this was some cold Antarctic location). We had already had compensation in the form of food credit & resort fee waived due to other irritating issues with our stay: a false alarm emergency at 2am where they didn't specify that it was a false fire alarm, leaving us with a lack of sleep & frustration that it was unclear what the alarm was for — we had an early morning the next day and felt our vacation was disrupted by the lack of care of the hotel to at least give an explanation a BROKEN lock on our balcony door — very dangerous that the room wasn't inspected to make sure outdoor access was fully closed! CLOGGED AC filter leaving us with congestion — honestly, the least of our worries among the rest of this chaos

We weren't expecting anything extraordinary in addition to that compensation, but the attitude & dismissiveness of the manager & hotel staff regarding BED BUGS was absolutely shocking and disgusting to me.

Some staff who were nice were the hotel's restaurant staff and some of the female front desk staff. A lot of times, the other staff members would say "manager not on duty", but then the manager was on duty when we went downstairs, or would just be entirely dismissive of our concerns, like we were crazy for complaining about bugs in a hotel.

Please do research thoroughly when booking hotels, as this seems to be an esteemed hotel, but I would never recommend this hotel due to the condescending attitude of the manager and the list of issues my co-guests and I faced. Obviously, I know that I'm staying in a tropical area, and I'm not an idiot who would make up a bed bug situation to talk to the manager when I was already tired from waking up at 2am for a false alarm on...

Received a text at 4:02p on 5/24/25 that smoking or vaping was detected in my room. I am a non-smoker and got extremely upset to receive a text informing me that I would be charged $300for alleged violation of their policy. I immediately called the front desk to request a mgr to come up and verify that there is absolutely no smoke in the room. Additionally, I was not even in the room when the alleged violation occurred, having just returned to the hotel after a day at Hanauma and visiting Holo Holo Market and riding up the elevator to the 16th floor, making multiple stops along the way before realizing that I wanted to return our towels back down on the 3rd floor, and then riding back up again.

The rooms manager Michael who visited was extremely condescending and unwilling to even acknowledge that there was no evidence of smoke or vape in the room—the reason why I requested a manager to visit immediately. Instead, his only response was to state that my objection to this report of violation would be noted in their manager’s log. Michael should not be in a customer-facing position if his response to an understandably upset patron is a smug and condescending response of “thank you for your feedback.” I was hoping for resolution and affirmation that there was zero evidence of smoking/vaping. I’m sorry, but whatever device is being employed in the a/c exchanges in guest rooms is not 100% accurate or reliable. Read through some of their reviews.

An interesting side note is that my husband who arrived earlier for work had to switch out of his first room due to the terrible odor emanating from the a/c vent. The room to which he was moved and when I joined him smelled less but after a few days, the ceiling by the a/c vent started to leak and water pooling behind the paint created bubbles on the ceiling and wall all along the a/c exchange. So we were then moved to this rm. The a/c in this room smelled like a combination of dirty dish rag and urine, but we really didn’t want to switch rms again. So we’ve been making do w this rm since we’re not in it much of the day. All this to say that maybe the hotel should repair and upgrade their a/c to reduce the rate of false positives by their detection devices and upset customers.

If you would like to avoid the hassle of dealing with a bogus $300 charge and a condescending rooms manager, please do not stay here. Additionally, consider that they have leaking, foul-smelling a/c and water pooling in the walls, before making a reservation, especially if you have respiratory issues or don’t want to potentially develop any health issues...