It’s playing for the mere millionaires being humiliated by billionaires in paradise.
Once upon a time, thousands of years ago, a surging mass of magma beneath the Pacific Ocean burst through the earth’s crust and began burping out a stream of lava, first underwater, then above, to form land. As the tectonic plate shifted, the eruption created a string of four islands—all of which are pretty nice, but the largest, known today as Hawaii’s Big Island, is as close to paradise as any human might deserve. On the beaches, the temperature hardly ever roams above the mid-80s F or below 70. It’s the tropics, yet it’s seldom muggy. And rain, when it comes, is like an afterthought—the gentlest of reminders of how achingly wonderful the island is the rest of the time.
But even in paradise, some spots are better than others. The island’s northwest shore is a gold coast made remote and exclusive by a border of long, flat fields of volcanic rock. Laurance Rockefeller opened the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel there in 1965. Then came the Hapuna, the Mauna Lani, the Orchid, and the Waikoloa. In his final years, Steve Jobs often hid out in Kona Village, a rustic, low-fi, Bali Ha’i-style hideaway best reached by private plane. Nearby is Kukio, a quiet homeowners’ community where KKR’s Paul Hazen, Sutter Hill Ventures’ David Anderson, and Silver Lake Partners’ David Roux became neighbors. And last to be built, nestled between Kukio and Kona Village, came the place that in many ways would outclass them all.
Hualalai, developed in 1996 by Japan’s Kajima Corp., is a pristine, manicured 865 acres on which are tucked a $1,000-a-night (for starters) Four Seasons hotel and a residential community of more than 300 homes and condominiums. The homeowners are served by their own private Hualalai Resort Club, and can also make use of the hotel’s phenomenal amenities. All in all, Hualalai has the scale to sustain two championship-caliber golf courses, seven bustling restaurants, five main swimming pools, and a snorkeling-friendly lagoon frequented by a spotted eagle ray and 4,000 other fish. The spa has an apothecary with compoundable herbal remedies and supplements made on-site. Along the links, golfers stop at “comfort stations” stocked with complimentary candy bars and bourbon. Poolside attendants offer chilled towels, sunglass cleaning, and Evian spritz service.
Michael Dell (net worth: $17.6 billion) liked Hualalai so much that in 2006 he bought the whole thing—hotel, resort, everything except the private homes. When his partner, Rockpoint Group, bowed out in 2014, Rob Walton ($33.7 billion) of the Walmart Stores family bought a minority stake. The most prominent homeowners include Citadel founder Ken Griffin ($5.6 billion), Starbucks Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz ($3 billion), brokerage pioneer Charles Schwab ($5.9 billion), KKR’s George Roberts ($4.6 billion), Oaktree Capital Management co-founder Bruce Karsh, GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons, Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle, and Warren Buffett’s sister Bertie. (Each of their places was purchased for or is currently appraised at $17 million to $23 million.) But no one who frequents Hualalai upstages the location. The shore has a shallow shelf stretching out almost a half-mile, making a friendly swim with a team of dolphins an almost daily possibility. And while some resorts to the north are caught in a wind tunnel between two volcanoes, Hualalai is in a calmer pocket. It’s like the clouds part for the place.
It was here, in the middle of all that, that one sunny day about five years ago a senior executive at a company you would definitely recognize wandered with his wife over to the Palm Grove Tranquility Pool—the one with a bar in the middle you can paddle up to—and saw that all the chaises longues were occupied on the pool deck. Then he walked a few feet to the beach and saw that the chairs there were taken, too. This man had been coming to Hualalai for years, first renting homes, then buying a four-bedroom house. He had done everything possible to be in a situation where the answer to every question would be yes. He had plunked down a $200,000 initiation fee and $40,000 a year in dues to join the Hualalai Resort Club. His three children had practically grown up at Hualalai, made friends there, and came back whenever they could. They loved the familial aloha spirit everyone talked about. Now, he was being told no.
As his wife started to cast about for a patch of grass on which to set up camp, the executive’s mind flooded. This was Hualalai, not South Beach. This wasn’t supposed to happen in paradise. (...)
Les Firestein is a Hollywood screenwriter who had brought his family to Hualalai as hotel guests for years. “It’s extravagant, but they deliver,” he says. “You know you’re going to have a perfect time.” Last summer a friend who owned a home there offered him free use of his place for a week. Firestein said yes. Then he quickly learned that if he wanted to do anything at the resort beyond hanging out at his friend’s house, he had to pay daily “unaccompanied guest” fees—$150 for adults and $75 each for his two children. The fee gave Firestein pause, but only briefly. “Right off the top, we’re paying $450 a day,” he says. “But then again, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s the Four Seasons. We’ll suck it up.’ ”
Firestein then learned that even after paying the fee, his family wasn’t entitled to the same access as hotel guests. “It was like there were two systems of privilege operating at the same time,” he says. He wasn’t permitted to reserve a table at any of the restaurants between 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. He had to show a guest ID card everywhere—“like, ‘Show me your papers,’ ” he says, still annoyed. (...)
He didn’t know it at the time, but he was encountering a new policy enacted by Hualalai Resorts, Dell’s management company on the ground. It has three prongs: First is the complex schedule of steep resort access fees based on the time of year and the relationship of the guest to the homeowner (sons and daughters are OK; nieces and nephews, friends, and renters have to pay). Next there’s a status hierarchy for making dinner reservations at any of the restaurants. Finally there’s the rule governing the use of the chaises longues by the pools, which the Firesteins encountered at its most cognitively dissonant moment, on a deserted pool deck in the rain.
The word “no” was getting an awful lot of use. And it was said to people who weren’t accustomed to hearing it.
by Robert Kolker, Bloomberg | Read more:
But even in paradise, some spots are better than others. The island’s northwest shore is a gold coast made remote and exclusive by a border of long, flat fields of volcanic rock. Laurance Rockefeller opened the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel there in 1965. Then came the Hapuna, the Mauna Lani, the Orchid, and the Waikoloa. In his final years, Steve Jobs often hid out in Kona Village, a rustic, low-fi, Bali Ha’i-style hideaway best reached by private plane. Nearby is Kukio, a quiet homeowners’ community where KKR’s Paul Hazen, Sutter Hill Ventures’ David Anderson, and Silver Lake Partners’ David Roux became neighbors. And last to be built, nestled between Kukio and Kona Village, came the place that in many ways would outclass them all.Hualalai, developed in 1996 by Japan’s Kajima Corp., is a pristine, manicured 865 acres on which are tucked a $1,000-a-night (for starters) Four Seasons hotel and a residential community of more than 300 homes and condominiums. The homeowners are served by their own private Hualalai Resort Club, and can also make use of the hotel’s phenomenal amenities. All in all, Hualalai has the scale to sustain two championship-caliber golf courses, seven bustling restaurants, five main swimming pools, and a snorkeling-friendly lagoon frequented by a spotted eagle ray and 4,000 other fish. The spa has an apothecary with compoundable herbal remedies and supplements made on-site. Along the links, golfers stop at “comfort stations” stocked with complimentary candy bars and bourbon. Poolside attendants offer chilled towels, sunglass cleaning, and Evian spritz service.
Michael Dell (net worth: $17.6 billion) liked Hualalai so much that in 2006 he bought the whole thing—hotel, resort, everything except the private homes. When his partner, Rockpoint Group, bowed out in 2014, Rob Walton ($33.7 billion) of the Walmart Stores family bought a minority stake. The most prominent homeowners include Citadel founder Ken Griffin ($5.6 billion), Starbucks Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz ($3 billion), brokerage pioneer Charles Schwab ($5.9 billion), KKR’s George Roberts ($4.6 billion), Oaktree Capital Management co-founder Bruce Karsh, GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons, Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle, and Warren Buffett’s sister Bertie. (Each of their places was purchased for or is currently appraised at $17 million to $23 million.) But no one who frequents Hualalai upstages the location. The shore has a shallow shelf stretching out almost a half-mile, making a friendly swim with a team of dolphins an almost daily possibility. And while some resorts to the north are caught in a wind tunnel between two volcanoes, Hualalai is in a calmer pocket. It’s like the clouds part for the place.
It was here, in the middle of all that, that one sunny day about five years ago a senior executive at a company you would definitely recognize wandered with his wife over to the Palm Grove Tranquility Pool—the one with a bar in the middle you can paddle up to—and saw that all the chaises longues were occupied on the pool deck. Then he walked a few feet to the beach and saw that the chairs there were taken, too. This man had been coming to Hualalai for years, first renting homes, then buying a four-bedroom house. He had done everything possible to be in a situation where the answer to every question would be yes. He had plunked down a $200,000 initiation fee and $40,000 a year in dues to join the Hualalai Resort Club. His three children had practically grown up at Hualalai, made friends there, and came back whenever they could. They loved the familial aloha spirit everyone talked about. Now, he was being told no.As his wife started to cast about for a patch of grass on which to set up camp, the executive’s mind flooded. This was Hualalai, not South Beach. This wasn’t supposed to happen in paradise. (...)
Les Firestein is a Hollywood screenwriter who had brought his family to Hualalai as hotel guests for years. “It’s extravagant, but they deliver,” he says. “You know you’re going to have a perfect time.” Last summer a friend who owned a home there offered him free use of his place for a week. Firestein said yes. Then he quickly learned that if he wanted to do anything at the resort beyond hanging out at his friend’s house, he had to pay daily “unaccompanied guest” fees—$150 for adults and $75 each for his two children. The fee gave Firestein pause, but only briefly. “Right off the top, we’re paying $450 a day,” he says. “But then again, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s the Four Seasons. We’ll suck it up.’ ”
Firestein then learned that even after paying the fee, his family wasn’t entitled to the same access as hotel guests. “It was like there were two systems of privilege operating at the same time,” he says. He wasn’t permitted to reserve a table at any of the restaurants between 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. He had to show a guest ID card everywhere—“like, ‘Show me your papers,’ ” he says, still annoyed. (...)
He didn’t know it at the time, but he was encountering a new policy enacted by Hualalai Resorts, Dell’s management company on the ground. It has three prongs: First is the complex schedule of steep resort access fees based on the time of year and the relationship of the guest to the homeowner (sons and daughters are OK; nieces and nephews, friends, and renters have to pay). Next there’s a status hierarchy for making dinner reservations at any of the restaurants. Finally there’s the rule governing the use of the chaises longues by the pools, which the Firesteins encountered at its most cognitively dissonant moment, on a deserted pool deck in the rain.
The word “no” was getting an awful lot of use. And it was said to people who weren’t accustomed to hearing it.
by Robert Kolker, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Don Riddle/Courtesy The Four Seasons
