Kate’s only here until Saturday and that’s coming up this weekend. Her vacation/education has been marred by illness, but she’s filling better now, though not well. She keeps on, dedicated to learning, just as you would hope a physician would be. She gets up every morning here at 6:30 AM to get ready for lectures.
Partly due to not being on the car contract while we were on Maui and partly due here to Kate’s illness, I’ve not gotten out and done my usual, as I’ve said before, but this has allowed me to spend time considering the resort experience.
From our lanai I can see four swimming pools, all shaped with rocks and plantings to look like lagoons. At the edge of the Hyatt’s property near the ocean, there is a faux lagoon that has sea water pumped in from the ocean. It’s big enough to support kayaking and other water sports. The other pools are fresh water.
Early morning bring lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, garden carts and the pool man out to balance the pool. Staff constantly set up and take down tables, place settings, stages, lights, microphones, chairs. Around 9AM guests begin staking out pool loungers, putting down towels and wraps. The kids begin giggling and screaming while adults walk along the sidewalks going to meetings or to the pool themselves.
There appear to be two very different type of guests: one, like Kate, is here as part of a group, this week the Association of Business Managers, Chrysler, Novell, AIG, and the group of hospitalists and clinicians with whom Kate is here; the other are guests who’ve come here on their own dime for vacation. This last is expensive since the cheapest rack rate is $625 a nights, groups get a substantial discount, vacationers don’t.
Six different restaurants and four separate bars service all these folks. Each night a solo singer performs on a stage set at the end of the grand entrance. Guest listen and watch the Pacific in the background. A jazz group plays each night in the Robert Louis Stevenson library and various Hawai’ian themed singers and dancers perform for special occasion luaus.
If you feel so inclined, you can also have massage of several different varities as well as various body polishes, mud baths and the usual pedicures and manicures. In case you forgot your pearls or your diamond bling there is a jewelry store. An art gallery sells high buck kitsch. There is a Hawai’ian quilt store, a Reyn Spooner store that sells only Hawai’ian shirts, a sandal and beachwear store, swimming wear, and a men’s and women’s clothing store. This is all in addition to the two large sundry shops that fill the place of the ordinary hotel gift shop.
Outside vendors come in and set up in the grand entrance: coral jewelry, ukele’s, hand-crafted jewelry. All the while the bell crew welcomes new visitors with a cymbidium lei and “Please, walk in through the grand entrance.”
Oops. Almost forgot the pro tour golf courses and the tennis courts and weight room.
All in all it’s an amazing feat of organization and logistics. How do they get all the supplies in for all of the restaurants?
Having said that, a person could come here and never experience Kauai except during the drive here to and from the airport. In that sense this is an expensive cocoon, a safe familiar environment for a certain clientele who want and expect certain services and security. I imagine these are folks at home in gated communities and upper class neighborhoods the world over. With all the privilege any person could hope for, they use it to insulate themselves from any kind of experience of foreign to their own.
In the end this, and not the decadent excess (which I enjoy for a bit), is what makes these places such a disservice both to the community in which they exist and to the clientele they serve.