CaliforniaGirl09
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2009
We just returned from Aulani on Monday so I thought I’d do a mini report. This was my second visit to Aulani. My daughter and I did a short girls’ trip about 5 years ago when she was 17. She is now doing a PhD—crazy how time flies—so it was just me, DH, and DS26 who is Special Needs.
After our first visit, I wasn’t sure that we would be back. We had a nice time overall, but it felt too crowded, there were way too many little kids for DD, and I didn’t love the Ko’olina area. I’m a little biased since my mom has a place on Maui in the Wailea area, and we go there a few times a year. When Stanford announced its football home opener against Hawaii, I almost booked the Royal Hawaiian, but we decided to use some extra points, go to the game, and stay at Aulani as DS was “dying” to go.
It might have been a big mistake, LOL, since we were thinking about getting rid of our BLT points (we also have VGC that we use only at DL). DS was in absolutely heaven at Aulani. I can’t tell you the number of times he said, “I love it here,” or “This place is awesome—it’s like Disneyland but more relaxing and not as noisy.”
I guess the lesson here is that paradise is all the in the eye of the beholder
But to be honest, seeing how much he loved it really had an impact on my enjoyment this time around as well. We had a great time, and we will be back with him sooner rather than later.
There have been some great TR’s here lately that were really helpful, so rather than go through each day, I thought I’d just break my thoughts down into highlights, “midlights,” and lowlights.
HIGHLIGHTS:
• Whoever posted the tip about renting a car with Alamo through Costco AND PRE-REGISTERING to avoid the lines, you are amazing. That was one of the single best tips of all time. The rental car lines were horrible and heading right to the car saved us tons of time and frustration. It also enabled us to be on the road to Ko’olina in under an hour and avoid any afternoon traffic. What a difference from my last trip when we hit horrible traffic. We breezed to Aulani in under 30 minutes and were at Island Market in time for lunch. So my tip to add to the Alamo one … if it’s possible to arrive in late morning or by lunch to miss afternoon traffic, do it!
• We arrived on a Wednesday, and despite the lines at check-in (see lowlights below), the resort didn’t feel crowded. We had no problem finding chairs in the shade the first two days. That would change on the weekend, so my second tip: avoid weekends and holidays if possible. It really was a different experience earlier in the week—everything from character wait-times, to elevator wait-times to the pools which became increasingly packed, etc. When we go back, we will probably head to Aulani on a Tuesday/Wednesday, stay a few days, and then fly to Maui for the weekend/rest of trip. Flying into HNL from Oakland enabled us to get lie flats on Hawaiian Airlines, which we loved so that is why we'd start with Aulani.
• We had requested a high floor in the Ewa tower overlooking the Luau, and we received a great room. DD and I had stayed in a studio villa last time, and it felt very small compared to the 1-bedroom, which was huge. Loved this room. I did miss the second full bathroom that we have at VGC and BLT for the all-important girl toilet and boy toilet, but the split bathroom made it a little more manageable. Mousekeeping was great. They came in for trash daily, changed towels on day 3/4, and we didn’t have any unpleasant knocks early in the morning with the sign on the door.
• Eggs “n” Things. I don’t think this place was here the last time we stayed or I missed it. But this was another great recommendation from this board. Had some of our best meals here. And bonus: our Uber eats credits from our Amex cards gave us almost free breakfast for two days (we used pick up feature rather than delivery to save the fees).
• Cinnamon rolls from Olelo. Wow. I am not much of a dessert or sweets eater, but for these I will make an exception. I ate the whole thing the first time and even okayed a second go around just to have another half. These are legit and some of the best CRs I’ve had in a long time.
• Disney Luau. This was probably the biggest shock of the trip for me—especially after watching it from the room for a few nights before we went. I really debated signing up for this, but DS loves luaus, I’d been to the one next door twice on other HNL trips, and we hadn’t taken him to a luau in a while so I decided to go for it. I didn’t do preferred seating, which was the right decision. We had to wait a few minutes longer to get in, but our seats were great. The story was well done, and it seemed much more intimate than it appeared from our balcony above. I commented to the woman who checked us in that I was shocked by how small it was as it looks huge from above. She laughed and said that everyone comments about that. I was pretty blown away by the quality of the food for a luau—and the open bar. Most luaus are watered down drinks and meh food. But the purple sweet potatoes and prime rib were excellent. I love prime rib, but rarely eat it—maybe once every couple years—and this was so good I went back for seconds. I was one of the only drinkers at the table of 12 (we were seated with a family of 6, and 3 single guys visiting from Waikiki area), and the drinks were so strong I could only do two Mai Tai’s, but the open bar made it feel like a much more upscale event. In other words, it felt like a big value add and (for our table at least) it didn’t seem to be costing Disney much. If they keep up the quality, I suspect we’ll be back frequently.
• Costco: I signed up for Costco to rent the car so we decided to visit the local Costco to grab some fresh fruit and other items to eat lunch in the room. We were easily sucked in on a few extras, and I could have bought a lot more. We ate lunch in the room the three days we were at the resort during the day and having the fruit worked out really well. Had we been there at meal time the pizza would have been perfect to take back. Next time!
• I was worried about the traffic for our off-resort plans on Friday, but it really couldn’t have gone better. We had booked a 1 pm boat ride for Pearl Harbor and then planned to head straight to the football game to get there early as we’d heard parking/traffic was going to be horrible. Hawaii is redoing the main Aloha stadium, which is right by the airport so we had to travel a little further east, but our timing was great. We left Aulani at about 11 am, breezed to Pearl Harbor, found parking right away, and had time to watch the movie, visit the museums, and grab a sandwich before getting in line for our boat. My son has a difficult time with quiet things like this, but he did great. We left Pearl Harbor around 2 pm, hit minor traffic to the stadium and got there early enough to park in one of the lots for free (the woman was setting up and said she wasn’t ready yet so just go ahead and park). The game was fun, but we left pretty early as the stadium was more a track facility and the metal bleacher seats were tight and uncomfortable—it was also raining so that made it easy. No traffic back to Aulani even on a Friday evening so that was great.
• Miscellaneous: loved the walking path along the water in the morning—great way to start the day—and the lazy river was much more fun than I expected. DD and I didn’t do it last time (not sure why), but it was worth the wait for innertubes.
MIDLIGHTS:
• Macarons and Mimosas (for DVC members). It was fun, but expensive. I assumed there would be bottomless mimosas, but we only got two for the $70ish price tag. We had 4? macarons to go along with the mimosas, and a really nice instructor who went through the process of making the “simple” but deceptively tricky to get right cookies. We had a couple cute take home gifts, and enjoyed it, but not enough to keep the mixology class I had booked for Saturday, which was even slightly more expensive.
• On my last trip with DD, the big highlight was Olelo room. We loved sitting on the couches and listening to the music. We ate there twice this go around. I was sad to see the couches gone, and maybe we had unlucky nights, but the music didn’t seem as good/fun—more background than part of the experience. Overall, the atmosphere wasn’t as fun/relaxed/casual as before—felt more like a regular restaurant—but it was still a good on-site option. Sushi was solid, and the service was really good. Thanks also to whoever mentioned the special DVC punch that is available here—it was really good (not nearly as sweet as I expected) and got DS’s seal of approval. He’s a one and done guy every so often.
• We only signed up for a few additional activities: I did an exercise paddle board class that was fun on Thursday morning for $30 and all three of us did sunrise yoga on Friday also for $30 each. Both were solid and something I’d do again, although I’ll probably try out the free offerings first the next time around.
• Characters. DS is all about the characters, and he had a great time using the app to find out when/where they were going to be every day. It was nice that some characters came out late on the evenings when there wasn’t a Luau (Sunday). Early in the week, we didn’t have problems with long lines, but by the weekend, it was necessary to get there pretty early to make the line cut off. I wish there had been a bit more character variety—Lilo, maybe?—but DS was happy so can’t complain.
• The onsite gym was nice but packed. I went at 7:30 am and I think a lot of people were on west coast/east coast time as I couldn’t get on a machine. I decided to lift weights, and they had a great little area with mirrors to do this and stretch, but unfortunately when I was there a woman had brought her two small children with her and they were spread out on mats taking up the whole area
. I’m not sure if this is allowed, but there wasn’t anyone in there monitoring.
LOWLIGHTS:
• Check-in: I had pre-registered, but the online check-in guy was AWOL when we got there so we had to wait in a silly-long line. The CM was very sweet though and our room was ready shortly after so that tempered some of the frustration. Apparently I probably didn’t need to wait in line at all, but no one who I asked before getting in line told me that and the website says to go to online check=in on arrival so I thought it was necessary. Sigh.
• Pool Chairs. On Wednesday and Thursday we arrived late (i.e. after 10 am) and easily found chairs in the shade in front of Ama Ama (thanks again to this board for that tip). But Saturday and Sunday were a different story. We had a pretty late start on Saturday after a character breakfast, but we lucked out and someone was leaving in front of Ama Ama right when we got there around noon. We didn’t know how lucky we were until the next day. On Sunday we got there around 10 and there was literally not an open chair anywhere—even on the beach. The entire pool area was packed in an unpleasant way. We walked around for about thirty minutes and couldn’t find anything. Eventually we put towels down on the grass under a palm tree and finally scrounged a couple chairs an hour or so later. The pools were also way too crowded. I don’t know if it was a weekend or holiday weekend issue, but not a great experience. Last time my daughter and I did a cabana at the then adult pool and I really miss that.
* Character Breakfast: I had low expectations going in, but this was even more disappointing and frustrating. We were really hungry by time we arrived at 10:15 and we weren't seated until nearly 11. First we had to wait to put our name in, then we got directed to the long line for Mickey (directly behind a large group of adults who had to take multiple pictures in different groups with multiple cameras, which when you are hungry is agony), then we sat in the waiting area only to be directed to another line to wait for Goofy—behind the same adult group. So painful! Other than Mickey and Goofy, we only had Max and Pluto who came to our seats. No Chip and Dale who we saw on other days. The food was also pretty disappointing. I missed the buffet from last time. The bread was fine, but the fruit plate was laughingly tiny (I wish I had a picture), and nothing on the menu really grabbed me. DS loved his waffles, but my traditional omelette wasn’t great. I know not to expect much from character meals, but this was worse than my already low expectations. DS is going to have to have his future "mandatory" character meals limited to the parks.
• Monkey Pod: I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion and that pretty much everyone on this board disagrees with me, LOL, but we’ve been going to Monkey Pod on Maui for years, and I really want to like it (the Mai Tais are award-winning), but IMO the food has been going down the hill for years. We stopped going to the one on Maui but decided to try the Ko’olina outlet in the hope that it was better. It was easily one of the worst dining experiences I’ve had in a long time, and MP is now dead to me. Even easy-to-please pizza eaters DS and DH said not again. My saimen was inedible—even Mr. Frugal DH who hates to waste food wouldn’t eat it—and the pizzas were underwhelming. We were seated on the outside patio downstairs and the swarms of flies were horrible. The waiter actually asked us if we wanted to move they were so bad even with the little thing they put on the table (should have been our first indication that flies were a problem as every table had this thing whirling around). The bar is great though—the local cider (Paradise) and Mai Tais—and if you do go, ask to be seated inside upstairs to avoid the flies.
But even with these few lowlights, overall it was a really fun trip, and DH was so happy I am really glad we gave Aulani a second chance!
(Sorry for the editing, but I keep getting weird pop up windows and it messed up my cut/paste from a word doc).
After our first visit, I wasn’t sure that we would be back. We had a nice time overall, but it felt too crowded, there were way too many little kids for DD, and I didn’t love the Ko’olina area. I’m a little biased since my mom has a place on Maui in the Wailea area, and we go there a few times a year. When Stanford announced its football home opener against Hawaii, I almost booked the Royal Hawaiian, but we decided to use some extra points, go to the game, and stay at Aulani as DS was “dying” to go.
It might have been a big mistake, LOL, since we were thinking about getting rid of our BLT points (we also have VGC that we use only at DL). DS was in absolutely heaven at Aulani. I can’t tell you the number of times he said, “I love it here,” or “This place is awesome—it’s like Disneyland but more relaxing and not as noisy.”
I guess the lesson here is that paradise is all the in the eye of the beholder
But to be honest, seeing how much he loved it really had an impact on my enjoyment this time around as well. We had a great time, and we will be back with him sooner rather than later.There have been some great TR’s here lately that were really helpful, so rather than go through each day, I thought I’d just break my thoughts down into highlights, “midlights,” and lowlights.
HIGHLIGHTS:
• Whoever posted the tip about renting a car with Alamo through Costco AND PRE-REGISTERING to avoid the lines, you are amazing. That was one of the single best tips of all time. The rental car lines were horrible and heading right to the car saved us tons of time and frustration. It also enabled us to be on the road to Ko’olina in under an hour and avoid any afternoon traffic. What a difference from my last trip when we hit horrible traffic. We breezed to Aulani in under 30 minutes and were at Island Market in time for lunch. So my tip to add to the Alamo one … if it’s possible to arrive in late morning or by lunch to miss afternoon traffic, do it!
• We arrived on a Wednesday, and despite the lines at check-in (see lowlights below), the resort didn’t feel crowded. We had no problem finding chairs in the shade the first two days. That would change on the weekend, so my second tip: avoid weekends and holidays if possible. It really was a different experience earlier in the week—everything from character wait-times, to elevator wait-times to the pools which became increasingly packed, etc. When we go back, we will probably head to Aulani on a Tuesday/Wednesday, stay a few days, and then fly to Maui for the weekend/rest of trip. Flying into HNL from Oakland enabled us to get lie flats on Hawaiian Airlines, which we loved so that is why we'd start with Aulani.
• We had requested a high floor in the Ewa tower overlooking the Luau, and we received a great room. DD and I had stayed in a studio villa last time, and it felt very small compared to the 1-bedroom, which was huge. Loved this room. I did miss the second full bathroom that we have at VGC and BLT for the all-important girl toilet and boy toilet, but the split bathroom made it a little more manageable. Mousekeeping was great. They came in for trash daily, changed towels on day 3/4, and we didn’t have any unpleasant knocks early in the morning with the sign on the door.
• Eggs “n” Things. I don’t think this place was here the last time we stayed or I missed it. But this was another great recommendation from this board. Had some of our best meals here. And bonus: our Uber eats credits from our Amex cards gave us almost free breakfast for two days (we used pick up feature rather than delivery to save the fees).
• Cinnamon rolls from Olelo. Wow. I am not much of a dessert or sweets eater, but for these I will make an exception. I ate the whole thing the first time and even okayed a second go around just to have another half. These are legit and some of the best CRs I’ve had in a long time.
• Disney Luau. This was probably the biggest shock of the trip for me—especially after watching it from the room for a few nights before we went. I really debated signing up for this, but DS loves luaus, I’d been to the one next door twice on other HNL trips, and we hadn’t taken him to a luau in a while so I decided to go for it. I didn’t do preferred seating, which was the right decision. We had to wait a few minutes longer to get in, but our seats were great. The story was well done, and it seemed much more intimate than it appeared from our balcony above. I commented to the woman who checked us in that I was shocked by how small it was as it looks huge from above. She laughed and said that everyone comments about that. I was pretty blown away by the quality of the food for a luau—and the open bar. Most luaus are watered down drinks and meh food. But the purple sweet potatoes and prime rib were excellent. I love prime rib, but rarely eat it—maybe once every couple years—and this was so good I went back for seconds. I was one of the only drinkers at the table of 12 (we were seated with a family of 6, and 3 single guys visiting from Waikiki area), and the drinks were so strong I could only do two Mai Tai’s, but the open bar made it feel like a much more upscale event. In other words, it felt like a big value add and (for our table at least) it didn’t seem to be costing Disney much. If they keep up the quality, I suspect we’ll be back frequently.
• Costco: I signed up for Costco to rent the car so we decided to visit the local Costco to grab some fresh fruit and other items to eat lunch in the room. We were easily sucked in on a few extras, and I could have bought a lot more. We ate lunch in the room the three days we were at the resort during the day and having the fruit worked out really well. Had we been there at meal time the pizza would have been perfect to take back. Next time!
• I was worried about the traffic for our off-resort plans on Friday, but it really couldn’t have gone better. We had booked a 1 pm boat ride for Pearl Harbor and then planned to head straight to the football game to get there early as we’d heard parking/traffic was going to be horrible. Hawaii is redoing the main Aloha stadium, which is right by the airport so we had to travel a little further east, but our timing was great. We left Aulani at about 11 am, breezed to Pearl Harbor, found parking right away, and had time to watch the movie, visit the museums, and grab a sandwich before getting in line for our boat. My son has a difficult time with quiet things like this, but he did great. We left Pearl Harbor around 2 pm, hit minor traffic to the stadium and got there early enough to park in one of the lots for free (the woman was setting up and said she wasn’t ready yet so just go ahead and park). The game was fun, but we left pretty early as the stadium was more a track facility and the metal bleacher seats were tight and uncomfortable—it was also raining so that made it easy. No traffic back to Aulani even on a Friday evening so that was great.
• Miscellaneous: loved the walking path along the water in the morning—great way to start the day—and the lazy river was much more fun than I expected. DD and I didn’t do it last time (not sure why), but it was worth the wait for innertubes.
MIDLIGHTS:
• Macarons and Mimosas (for DVC members). It was fun, but expensive. I assumed there would be bottomless mimosas, but we only got two for the $70ish price tag. We had 4? macarons to go along with the mimosas, and a really nice instructor who went through the process of making the “simple” but deceptively tricky to get right cookies. We had a couple cute take home gifts, and enjoyed it, but not enough to keep the mixology class I had booked for Saturday, which was even slightly more expensive.
• On my last trip with DD, the big highlight was Olelo room. We loved sitting on the couches and listening to the music. We ate there twice this go around. I was sad to see the couches gone, and maybe we had unlucky nights, but the music didn’t seem as good/fun—more background than part of the experience. Overall, the atmosphere wasn’t as fun/relaxed/casual as before—felt more like a regular restaurant—but it was still a good on-site option. Sushi was solid, and the service was really good. Thanks also to whoever mentioned the special DVC punch that is available here—it was really good (not nearly as sweet as I expected) and got DS’s seal of approval
. He’s a one and done guy every so often.• We only signed up for a few additional activities: I did an exercise paddle board class that was fun on Thursday morning for $30 and all three of us did sunrise yoga on Friday also for $30 each. Both were solid and something I’d do again, although I’ll probably try out the free offerings first the next time around.
• Characters. DS is all about the characters, and he had a great time using the app to find out when/where they were going to be every day. It was nice that some characters came out late on the evenings when there wasn’t a Luau (Sunday). Early in the week, we didn’t have problems with long lines, but by the weekend, it was necessary to get there pretty early to make the line cut off. I wish there had been a bit more character variety—Lilo, maybe?—but DS was happy so can’t complain.
• The onsite gym was nice but packed. I went at 7:30 am and I think a lot of people were on west coast/east coast time as I couldn’t get on a machine. I decided to lift weights, and they had a great little area with mirrors to do this and stretch, but unfortunately when I was there a woman had brought her two small children with her and they were spread out on mats taking up the whole area
. I’m not sure if this is allowed, but there wasn’t anyone in there monitoring.LOWLIGHTS:
• Check-in: I had pre-registered, but the online check-in guy was AWOL when we got there so we had to wait in a silly-long line. The CM was very sweet though and our room was ready shortly after so that tempered some of the frustration. Apparently I probably didn’t need to wait in line at all, but no one who I asked before getting in line told me that and the website says to go to online check=in on arrival so I thought it was necessary. Sigh.
• Pool Chairs. On Wednesday and Thursday we arrived late (i.e. after 10 am) and easily found chairs in the shade in front of Ama Ama (thanks again to this board for that tip). But Saturday and Sunday were a different story. We had a pretty late start on Saturday after a character breakfast, but we lucked out and someone was leaving in front of Ama Ama right when we got there around noon. We didn’t know how lucky we were until the next day. On Sunday we got there around 10 and there was literally not an open chair anywhere—even on the beach. The entire pool area was packed in an unpleasant way. We walked around for about thirty minutes and couldn’t find anything. Eventually we put towels down on the grass under a palm tree and finally scrounged a couple chairs an hour or so later. The pools were also way too crowded. I don’t know if it was a weekend or holiday weekend issue, but not a great experience. Last time my daughter and I did a cabana at the then adult pool and I really miss that.
* Character Breakfast: I had low expectations going in, but this was even more disappointing and frustrating. We were really hungry by time we arrived at 10:15 and we weren't seated until nearly 11. First we had to wait to put our name in, then we got directed to the long line for Mickey (directly behind a large group of adults who had to take multiple pictures in different groups with multiple cameras, which when you are hungry is agony), then we sat in the waiting area only to be directed to another line to wait for Goofy—behind the same adult group. So painful! Other than Mickey and Goofy, we only had Max and Pluto who came to our seats. No Chip and Dale who we saw on other days. The food was also pretty disappointing. I missed the buffet from last time. The bread was fine, but the fruit plate was laughingly tiny (I wish I had a picture), and nothing on the menu really grabbed me. DS loved his waffles, but my traditional omelette wasn’t great. I know not to expect much from character meals, but this was worse than my already low expectations. DS is going to have to have his future "mandatory" character meals limited to the parks.
• Monkey Pod: I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion and that pretty much everyone on this board disagrees with me, LOL, but we’ve been going to Monkey Pod on Maui for years, and I really want to like it (the Mai Tais are award-winning), but IMO the food has been going down the hill for years. We stopped going to the one on Maui but decided to try the Ko’olina outlet in the hope that it was better. It was easily one of the worst dining experiences I’ve had in a long time, and MP is now dead to me. Even easy-to-please pizza eaters DS and DH said not again. My saimen was inedible—even Mr. Frugal DH who hates to waste food wouldn’t eat it—and the pizzas were underwhelming. We were seated on the outside patio downstairs and the swarms of flies were horrible. The waiter actually asked us if we wanted to move they were so bad even with the little thing they put on the table (should have been our first indication that flies were a problem as every table had this thing whirling around). The bar is great though—the local cider (Paradise) and Mai Tais—and if you do go, ask to be seated inside upstairs to avoid the flies.
But even with these few lowlights, overall it was a really fun trip, and DH was so happy I am really glad we gave Aulani a second chance!
(Sorry for the editing, but I keep getting weird pop up windows and it messed up my cut/paste from a word doc).
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