John Wayne Carlson

Review of Aulani, A Disney Resort and Sp...

A good resort, but the biggest challenge is that i...

A good resort, but the biggest challenge is that it is overbuilt for rooms and under built for services. When you pay $750 or more a night it's ludicrous to have to wake at sunrise to claim a lounge chair. Hundreds, and I mean hundreds of chairs are "reserved" by guests at sunrise so if you go down after breakfast you're out of luck. There's literally no place to sit unless you want to go down to the beach itself. You must find one unclaimed chair and hope to build your claim through out the day. The resort claims it will remove abandoned items after one hour but we never saw that happen. Even though the chairs next to the one lounge we did find we claimed for four hours and we alerted staff, they were never freed up.

Two plus hour waits for character breakfasts were commonplace and we decided to eat across the street most of the time. There are positives, the kids loved the pools, slides, the reef was a big hit and the beach services were easy to use.

Typical for Disney the cost of food was eye watering, a poolside lunch for three is $100, but that's not a surprise. The service was really good and reasonably fast.

Finally, we did witness an issue in the slide where there was a problem with a guest and the team was very quick to respond and ensure that the child was safe and the ride was secure. You hope to not see such things but it does bring confidence that the team is trained and responsive.