Hearts in Hawai'i
Our Trip To Maui (2018)--Prologue
5/1/2018
Overview
This was going to be our eleventh trip to Maui. There is something about each trip to Maui which drives us to want another trip. Be it the weather, the activities we've experienced here, the food, the culture--everything about Maui makes us yearn to visit again. Except for, at times, the traffic. Traffic on the west side can be a real bear, and it seems to get worse with each subsequent trip.
As soon as we returned from our 2016 trip, we started talking about this trip. Where we would stay was never in doubt--the Lahaina Shores Beach Resort! We had stayed in Room 505 in 2014 ($155/night) and 2016 ($139.50/night, due to our 10% discount for being repeat customers), but the rate has soared to $280/night after extensive renovations were done in 2015. While this is a great room, the price increase was more than we were willing to pay.
Fortunately, Chase N Rainbows manages ten different rooms at Lahaina Shores, and we found one which was going for $220 per night, $198/night after our discount. It featured a King Sized bed and had been renovated, so it was an easy choice for us to make.
Booking the room over a year before our arrival did two things. First, it secured the room before someone else could snatch it up, and second, it meant that we no longer had flexibility on when to arrive and depart. This can help sometimes in finding a lower airfare rate, but we felt that booking the room first was more important. So began the process last August of checking out the airfares and vacation packages (combining airfare and car rental), on the Delta, United and American Airline websites. The sudden large price drop we experienced on United on our last trip never materialized. United's prices stayed basically unchanged, as did American's. Delta's? They were all over the place but the problem with booking through them was that of flight timing. We prefer a package which gets us to Maui in the early afternoon, and Delta simply didn't offer that. We've had trips with Delta where we arrived on Maui between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m., and those flights were never fun. By the time we secured our rental car and made the nighttime drive to Lahaina, we had been up for 22-24 hours straight. As I said, not fun.
Eventually, United's flight times were similar to American's. American had a slightly better price (about $100 cheaper). But United had two flights out, two flights back. American had two flights out, but three flights back. We didn't want that.
[post note] As it turned out, we needed three flights to get back to Minnesota on United after our Maui to Chicago flight was delayed. By TWELVE FARGING HOURS, leading us to wish we had booked with American Airlines. This is a mistake I doubt we'll repeat on our next Maui trip.
So, with the room booked and the airfare/car reserved, the countdown began. A long, long countdown. 
About These Pictures
All the pictures you see on these blogs were taken with either a Nikon D7100 or a Canon S120 Powershot camera. Both cameras were also used in 2016. All pics were shot in RAW+JPG mode, and post-processed in Lightroom 5. A circular polarizer was also frequently used on my Nikon. The 18-140 lens on my Nikon was used for most of the pics shot with that camera, exception being when I attached a 50mm f/1.4 lens to get better low-light pictures when we did the Atlantis Submarine tour.
Previous: 3/11/2018--Another Season Ends--What Happens Now?
Index of Blog Pages
last updated november 19, 2021
|