First Resort Stay on Maui!

I’m sure you know by now that we L O V E Maui! It’s our number one destination choice  time after time, and we are lucky enough to be only a 5-hour flight away from our favorite island! We typically stay in a condo, but on our most recent trip in July, we stayed at a resort for the first time! We stayed at the Westin Ka’anapali Ocean Resort Villas and it was stunning! PRO TIP: Get on the Westin’s email list! We stayed at the Westin Seattle many years ago, and ever since we have been receiving emails with really great offers at a number of their properties! Our 5-night stay in Maui was only $799! And there is no vacation ownership tour required! It is optional though, and they offer a resort credit if you do. We actually chose to take the tour because we wanted to scope out their newest property, The Nanea, and the $100 resort credit didn’t hurt either!

This is one of their newer properties and the location can’t be beat! It’s located 5 minutes north of Whaler’s Village where you will find several high-end hotels, fun restaurants, and the shopping mall. The property is right on the beach, so you get an AMAZING sunset every night, and you can watch the sun rise over the West Maui mountains to the east! There is also a great jogging path right along the beach. We took Brayden out every morning for a stroll and enjoyed the fresh ocean air! He actually would hop in his stroller first thing to let us know he was ready to roll!

This resort is definitely family-friendly! I personally think the pools are the best! There are several areas for kids and two awesome pools for little ones! They also have a kids club so parents can take a little break from the kiddos if they need a vacation on their vacation! You can order food and drinks poolside, but the best cost-saving tip is to bring your own beverages in a pool-safe container! Or only drink during happy hours!

Brayden loved the kiddie pool, which was only a foot and a half deep and had a waterfall on one side! Splashing in the waterfall was a big hit. He also loved the big play pool which had a huge pirate ship in the center with waterslides! So much fun! And adjacent to the pirate ship is a big play structure in the shade! We will have to return when he’s a bit bigger so he can go on the big-kid waterslide in the main pool. We couldn’t take him on that one because they only allow one person to slide at a time. Shoot…a reason to return?!?

I do have to mention the one thing about the resort that we didn’t enjoy, and unfortunately, it’s a design flaw with the hotel, so it’s not something that can be remedied.  When you enter the door to your villa, you walk into a small vestibule area. There are two doors inside there-one on the left, and one on the right. This was a bit surprising to us. We found out that this is a terrible design if you like it quiet…which we do because we have a baby who takes naps during the day and goes to bed early.

Because the doors and rooms face each other, you can hear so much more than you would if the doors were side-by-side in typical hotel design. We could hear our neighbors’ children laughing and screaming in the bathtub at night! And you also have to listen to TWO doors slamming shut when people are going in and out, rather than just one. Since the vestibule area has tile floors, it is essentially a small, but very loud, echo chamber! This was pretty difficult for us to deal with as our neighbors had several children running in and out of their room at all hours…and they didn’t do so quietly. Just something to keep in mind if you decide to stay here! *Note: I am not sure that all of the rooms in the resort are set-up this way. I would ask before booking!

The resort has several restaurants that are very family-friendly, and even a higher-end Italian restaurant, Pulehu, that was very accommodating when we arrived with a stroller and no reservations! We walked down the jogging path to eat at Duke’s one night, and also had two nights of sushi take-out from Sansei in Kapalua. (It was just easier to eat in some nights when Brayden was exhausted!)

And as always, we ventured out to Kapalua Golf Course to eat at our favorite restaurant, Plantation House. We had breakfast there several times, and actually had dinner there for the first time! (We met up with some friends who were in Maui at the same time we were…we were actually on the same flight out of San Jose! What are the odds?) Dinner did not disappoint! I’d say it was slightly more expensive than a dinner would be in downtown Lahaina or Ka’anapali, but the views are outstanding, so we feel it’s totally worth it!

We had another amazing time in Maui, and every time we go, we don’t want to come home! Leon is always grabbing real estate magazines while we’re there and we daydream of what our retirement home will look like! We are blessed to be able to travel to Maui so often and we cherish every moment while we’re there! I can’t wait to continue to take more adventures with Brayden as he gets older and is able to do more with us!