The Four Seasons Resort at Hualalai, Big Island.
Business Wire photo

The Big Island hotel, 12 miles north of Kailua-Kona, opened today aiming at the top of the luxury tourist market. Rooms start at $400 a day and run up to the $5,000 level.

It consists of 36 separate buildings, with accommodations in four clusters of one- and two-story bungalows of one to eight rooms each.

"We didn't want to create another large resort in Hawaii. We wanted to create another Hawaiian resort," said Jim Preskitt, vice president of marketing for Hualalai Development Co., developer or the 700-acre resort-residential property on the coast just north of the Keahole Airport.

"It's really four crescents," Preskitt said. Each crescent has a different water feature, either a waterfall, a pond or a pool, and they line half a mile of white sand beach.

Japan's Kajima Corp., which picked up the development rights to the Bishop Estate land when another Japanese developer, Cosmo World, abandoned its plans for a multi-hotel resort, is building a complete residential-resort-golf community on the site, Preskitt said.

All the amenities of the hotel, the Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course that opened there in January and the hotel's pool and restaurants will be open to residents who buy homes there, Preskitt said.

The 18-hole golf course is the fourth Nicklaus course in Hawaii but his first carved entirely out of a lava field.

Managed by Four Seasons-Regent Hotels and Resorts, an international luxury hotel management company, the hotel has given a job boost to the Big Island, plagued by sugar industry layoffs. The hotel had some 2,000 applicants for its 350 jobs.

With the Four Seasons complete, an era in Hawaii hotel building is over for the time being. There are no more major hotels on order.

Hualalai Development Co. had to cross many hurdles to get the hotel built. There were local protests, claiming that the resort would damage the environment and hinder access to native Hawaiian fishing areas.

Last month, the developer was fined $2,659 by the County of Hawaii for stockpiling sand within a shoreline setback area.

The company was also ordered in August to stop dredging sand in the area until questions about Hawaiian cultural sites are answered.