Hawaii Suggestions

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by Ksyrup

The rental car thing has been an issue for awhile. There were reports of people renting Uhauls last year because there were no cars available on the island.

We've known we were going for a year so I got my reservation last July. 12 days for a premium SUV for $1300. They took the reservation - I hope they know how to hold the reservation!

For Kona, our reservation is around $900 for a full size car through Hertz. Haven't done Honolulu yet - hopefully this weekend as I need to sort out our inter-island trip from Hilo to Honolulu so I know when to set the car pickup for.

With trip planning: big blocks first, then small blocks. Still need to lock down hotels/airbnb on Oahu, too. That said, I think we'll do like we're doing on the big island: hotel for a few days, airbnb somewhere else on the island for a few days.

SI

[Ksyrup]

We had to lock down lodging first, mainly because we were cashing in my parents timeshare points with Marriott and had to book a couple of months earlier than we could even consider booking airfare. So I did my best to guessimate the cheapest days to fly in and out based on existing airline schedules and settled on Wednesday to (the following) Sunday - about 11 days. Since car reservations were open at that point, I was able to grab a pretty good deal (about $100 a day for an 8 seat SUV).

When airline schedules opened up, I wanted to use Delta miles as much as I could, and it turned out that Wednesday to Monday was actually cheaper. So I got 6 round trip tickets with 350K miles and $66 and booked one night at a VRBO in Hanalei since we needed a place to stay for that extra night.

We're spending just short of 2 weeks on Kauai and pretty much only have to pay for food, car and gas (which might cost more than food by July!).

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by Ksyrup

We had to lock down lodging first, mainly because we were cashing in my parents timeshare points with Marriott and had to book a couple of months earlier than we could even consider booking airfare. So I did my best to guessimate the cheapest days to fly in and out based on existing airline schedules and settled on Wednesday to (the following) Sunday - about 11 days. Since car reservations were open at that point, I was able to grab a pretty good deal (about $100 a day for an 8 seat SUV).

When airline schedules opened up, I wanted to use Delta miles as much as I could, and it turned out that Wednesday to Monday was actually cheaper. So I got 6 round trip tickets with 350K miles and $66 and booked one night at a VRBO in Hanalei since we needed a place to stay for that extra night.

We're spending just short of 2 weeks on Kauai and pretty much only have to pay for food, car and gas (which might cost more than food by July!).

I wanted to lock in the two "best" deals first - I had 5 Marriott 35K or less nights to use so I wanted to make sure they were available at the hotel we wanted to stay out (only 2 were the right category: one in Honolulu and one in Kona). So I decided we have more options in Honolulu and went with the one in Kona.

The flights were under $800 for the non-stop back. I mean, $2.3K is a lot of money but not bad for that flight and I'm still saving up miles for (maybe?) Japan in a couple of years. Again, this goes back to the - that's like a normal Hawaii flight while everything else right now cost a lot more so Hawaii just made sense whereas it didn't in the past.

If I had gone with the one stop back, I could have saved about $250 across the three of us, but the times were so much worse. The non-stop leaves at 7pm and gets back to Houston at 8am, so it's almost like a true overnight. However, the one stops meant you had to either leave early morning HNL time (who wants to get up early on the last day of vacation?) or late afternoon/evening. The late afternoon ones all landed in LAX/SFO at around midnight so if you were late or missed your flight, you're spending the night at the airport. Or the evening ones hit LAX/SFO at 4~5am so you're running around the airport about the time you'd much rather be asleep. Now, I don't sleep great on a plane, but I'll sleep better there than running around LAX at 5am, trying to make a 45 minute connection.


I was kicking myself because the first time I looked, I had drawn up an itinerary for $602 for flight. It had the "running through LAX at 5am" problem on the way back and a tight connection on the way there, and we'd be coming back Wednesday but, dude - Hawaii for 3 for under $2K. But they upped the price before we could decide on what to do (i.e. we weren't even sure we were going to go, hadn't checked work calendars to see if we could get them off, etc). However, with the price change, it meant Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday were all about the same price so I just tacked on 2 more days from our initial plan and got better times. Now we're there 2 full weeks: Friday-Friday, 1 full week on each island.

Once I knew I could get both, I basically clicked "buy" within a few minutes of each because those were the things I knew for sure we needed to lock in. And, I just checked: man, am I glad I did - any itinerary during our time is about $900 for iffy-timed flights. And our actual itinerary would cost $1200 now.

Lodging is set for 5 days in Kona, car for 7 days on the big island. Need to get an airbnb for 2 days near Hilo (narrowed that down), flight from Hawaii airlines between the islands (under $100 a ticket- going to pay as much for our bags as for us, honestly - just need to decide on a time but options basically hourly), hotel for 3/4 days in Honolulu, airbnb for 3/4 days on Oahu, and car for Honolulu.

SI

[Ksyrup]

We just got back from 12 days on Kauai. My suggestion... go.