Arrival

On the second evening a double rainbow came up over the resort and stayed for about four minutes, which on the south shore of Kauai is closer to a scheduled event than a piece of luck. The trade winds push showers across from the mountains most afternoons, the sun is low and behind you, and the geometry does the rest. Nobody around the pool looked up for long. That tells you how often it happens, and how good the pool is.

Kauai keeps its buildings no taller than a mature palm, and this resort is the most conspicuous consequence of that on the island. Instead of a tower there are long, low plantation-style wings with green tile roofs, spread wide across the site and joined by open-sided corridors that are outdoors in every sense that matters.

The effect is that a very large resort does not look or feel like one from the ground. You almost never see the whole property at once. The cost is walking: from the far rooms to the far restaurant is a genuine ten minutes, and you will do that walk in the rain at some point.

The room

I had an Ocean View king on an upper floor. It is a warm, wide, slightly traditional room: a carved timber headboard, tiled floors, a sitting chair, and sliding doors the full width of the wall onto a lanai deep enough for two chairs and a table. The materials are timber and stone rather than the pale plaster that has taken over resort design in the last decade, and it has aged more gracefully than that description suggests.

It is not a new room. Nothing is broken or tired, but the bones are older than most of the guests and the refreshes have been respectful rather than transformative. The difference shows in the bathroom more than anywhere else. If you have just come from a property that reopened last winter, you will notice. If you came for Kauai, you will be on the lanai. There is a huge problem with the rooms facing south, and ours had it, so we had to move: humidity. There is a strong mildew smell and a pervasive dampness that was oppressive. For a beach resort nothing dried — not suits, not spills of water in the room, not clothes hung outside or in.

Noted

Observed on the stay, not measured.

What	Checked on the stay
Beach	Keoneloa Bay; heavy shorebreak, often not swimmable
Lagoon	Saltwater, sandy-bottomed, swimmable every day of the stay
Wi-Fi	Strong and constant through the resort
Water pressure	High and hot
Bed	Mediocre, and it felt damp
Air conditioning	Could not pull the humidity out of the room
Longest walk	About ten minutes, room to far restaurant
Rainbows	Most afternoons, late, looking east

Eating

Tidepools is the reason to book a table before you fly. The dining room is a set of thatched hales standing over a koi lagoon, open on every side, lit low, with fish moving under the walkways and frogs starting up at dusk. It is the most atmospheric restaurant on the south shore and it books out days ahead.

Dondero’s is the Italian room and the more formal one. Beyond those two the resort does what large resorts do: a poolside grill, a lobby bar facing west, coffee at six for the people the time difference woke up. The cooking is better than it needs to be, particularly the fish, which is landed locally and treated simply.

The luau on the lawn is worth going to once with clear eyes about what it is: a professional show for visitors, performed well, with an imu pit, kalua pork, hula and a fire dancer to close. It does not claim to be anything else. If you have children they will talk about the fire for the rest of the trip, and possibly at the wedding.

The water you will actually use

Here is the thing to understand before booking. The beach in front of the resort is Keoneloa Bay, known locally as Shipwreck, and it has a heavy shorebreak. For much of the year it is not a swimming beach. It is a magnificent beach to walk, to look at, and to watch better surfers than you get it wrong on, and the lifeguards will tell you plainly when to stay out.

So the resort built its own ocean. A meandering saltwater lagoon, a chain of river pools with waterfalls between them, and a slide through lava rock. The lagoon is the cleverest thing here: salt water, sandy-bottomed, calm, large enough to swim properly in, and lined up with the sea beyond so that it never feels like a substitute even though that is exactly what it is. There is an adults-only pool as well, which on a property with this many families is not a nicety but the entire difference between a restful stay and a loud one.

Anara Spa is the other reason people book here rather than elsewhere on the south shore. A number of the treatment rooms are open-air, in garden courtyards with lava-rock showers, so a massage happens with birds and wind and the smell of wet ground rather than under a ceiling with a whale recording. Ask for an outdoor room when you book; the indoor ones are ordinary.

The grounds are the underrated part. Koi ponds, swans, gardens that have had decades to mature, and a resident macaw in the open lobby that has worked out exactly how much attention it can extract. Walking the site before the pools open is the best half hour of the day here.

Service moments

Standard for a resort of this class, nothing to write about.

A resort that built its own ocean because the real one was not co-operating, and got away with it.

Who it is for, and who it is not

Come with a family, or as anyone who wants to swim somewhere warm and calm and does not need the room to be the point. Ask for an upper floor on the ocean side and take the lanai seriously as a room you will use. Book Tidepools before you fly. Hire the car for the whole stay rather than the days you think you need it, because nothing on Kauai is close to anything else. And look east in the late afternoon.

Look elsewhere if your idea of Hawaii is walking into flat water from your towel; Poipu Beach Park, a few minutes west, does that and this beach does not. Look elsewhere if you want current rather than comfortable. And know that the scenery that makes Kauai extraordinary is on the north shore and in the west canyon, both long drives on a single road with no alternative, so staying here means days out that start early.

See the full set: Grand Hyatt Kauai — in frames.