The Halekulani hotel group need a wake-up call
The Halekulani hotel group includes the Halepuna Hotel and the Orchids Restaurant. I would like to do seperate reviews, but trustpilot does not enable you to do a review of a restaurant separately from the hotels, because the web site is one and the same.
The Orchids Restaurant is fabulous, the waiter service is excellent and the food is awesome, such a shame it is within such a second-rate hotel - I would give this restaurant a FIVE STAR REVIEW.
Meanwhile, I discovered the Halekulani hotel group cater for Japanese visitors. They go out of their way to make sure that if you are Japanese you are most welcome, with staff speaking Japanese plus the really great Japanese restaurant mentioned above.
We are not Japanese so we were treated as second-class citizens in ... Hawaii USA. Yes, they bow and fall over themselves for the Japanese clients we saw them serve.... but not us.
Clearly they have had a hard time during Covid with almost no customers for a time and it shows - their staff are like beginners learning for the first time and they have numerous rules that have to be adhered to, lines you must form here and again there and back here again. Then if you do not follow the rules exactly, you get told off by not one, but a succession of management, culminating with a grilling by an enormous human like a nightclub bouncer, to make sure we "do not do this again" - our crime was to accidently miss out the second queue (line) we were supposed to join for breakfast after completing the processes at the first queue. Remember they pretend to be a FIVE STAR HOTEL right !?!? They had us lining-up like school children multiple times to get to eat breakfast at $45 a head plus taxes and tips. Just do not go to this place, it is awful. Much better is the Prince hotel further up the beach - we booked there a week later.