4 Things I Didn’t Like About the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa

Admittedly, my wife and I didn’t do any research before booking this stay. If we had, we never would have booked this hotel. But the things we disliked extended to experiences during the stay — things we never could’ve predicted.

From weird service quirks to our disgust over the animals living in the hotel lobby, the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa was anything but the magical oceanfront stay we had expected.

Here are 4 things we didn’t like about this hotel — things we disliked enough that we have no interest in staying here again.

A Quick Introduction to the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa

The Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa is a Category 7 property in World of Hyatt, meaning standard nights cost 30,000 points per night. You also can book a night here with a Category 1-7 free night award from Hyatt.

As a Category 7 property in an area famous for high-priced hotels, cash rates during our January 2025 visits were around $500 per night after taxes. That was the price for a standard room with a king-size bed and no ocean views, to be clear.

The hotel property is massive. There’s no other way to put it. The hotel has over 800 hotel rooms, multiple dining outlets, a spa, a gym, a flea market on the ground floor, numerous kids activities, and much, much more.

4 Things We Disliked at the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa

Things started on the right foot. We got a friendly greeting from staff members when we pulled up to the hotel’s Ka’anapali location near Whalers Village. We told the valet attendant that we were just checking in and then leaving shortly for dinner, but he asked to hold our keys “just in case” he needed to move the car.

From that point on, numerous things went wrong during our stay.

1. Weird Experiences During Check-In

As we approached the front desk, an employee smiled as she called us forward. Once we approached the desk, she never once looked at our faces or made eye contact with us. That was strange.

It was also strange to hear her describe our upgrade to an oceanfront room, thanks to my World of Hyatt Globalist status — the program’s top tier. She described this as “the best room type we offer upgrades to.” I checked Hyatt’s mobile app as we walked in the door, and I knew there were multiple suites available.

Her description of the upgrade, reading between the lines, sounded like, “We don’t offer upgrades to suites, even though we are supposed to under the program’s terms and conditions.” I didn’t press the issue to avoid conflict.

Hot Tip:

Hyatt’s program terms state that “Globalists will receive the best room available at the time of check-in … including Standard Suites.” However, each hotel determines these rooms at its sole discretion, and some hotels take liberties with these terms to refuse suite upgrades. You can press for clarity if a hotel has standard suites available and refuses to upgrade you.

Next, the employee disappeared into a back room and returned with fresh flower leis. She haphazardly threw the leis on the counter, and we picked them up to put them on ourselves. Compare this to our social media manager, Chris Hassan, visiting the property in 2022. Staff put the leis on each member of his family individually — in the midst of Hawaii’s strict COVID-19 protocols, nonetheless.

After finishing our check-in, we went back to the main entrance to grab our car and head to the nearby Whalers Village for a meal. The valet staff had no idea where our car was.

Because we were planning to leave again quickly, we hadn’t checked in our car with the valet team, meaning we didn’t have a claim check. Employees also hadn’t logged the car in their system since we said we were returning quickly. However, the car wasn’t in the roundabout near the entrance, and the employee I’d given the keys to wasn’t around.

A full 15 minutes later, they figured out that our car was in the valet lot and sent someone to get it. The confusion of a disappearing rental car was anxiety-inducing.

2. Slamming Doors

Room doors in our hallway slammed loudly. We heard each and every time our neighbors closed their doors.

Strangely, the doors closed at a snail’s pace until the last moment. Then the closing mechanism released and the heavy, wooden doors banged into their resting position. We were glad our neighbors didn’t enter their rooms late at night during our 2-night stay.

3. Poor-Quality Lounge Items

Part of the Hawaiian experience is some fresh juice from the numerous fruits available on the islands. Pineapple-orange-guava (POG) is famous, but other juices abound. And we had these fresh juices during our stays at other Maui hotels during this trip.

Not at the Hyatt Regency Maui Hotel and Resort, though. We had breakfast in the Regency Club lounge each morning, a perk of my elite status, and were surprised to find a juice machine serving “vaguely tastes like juice, but it’s mostly sugar water.”

At a Hyatt Place or inexpensive airport hotel, this wouldn’t surprise me in the least. I wouldn’t complain while drinking it at those hotels, either. But we were surprised that a luxury hotel on an island renowned for fresh juice would serve something subpar to its elite guests in the lounge.

Moreover, I was surprised to find this picture in Chris’ review of the hotel from 2022. During our daily breakfast in the lounge, we found less than a third of the offerings he had during his visit a few years ago.

Instead, during daily breakfast, there were a few small bowls of fruit, oatmeal, 2 hot dishes, and a few muffins. Cold cuts, croissants, and other pastries weren’t available. The best summary is that we had far fewer options than what the hotel seemed to provide in the past.

We rated the breakfast as “lacking” during our stay. Once I started writing this story and found out the offerings used to be much better, I became even more disappointed by the breakfast experience. Again, the lounge felt like a Hyatt Place breakfast, not something we expected from the lounge at a Category 7 Hyatt Regency.

Hot Tip:

For a different perspective on this property, check out Chris Hassan’s in-depth review of the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa.

4. Improper Conditions for Animals

And now, our chief complaint about the hotel.

If we had known the hotel had numerous animals living in the lobby, we never would have booked this property. Wild animals should live … well, in the wild. It’s our fault that we didn’t read anything about this hotel before booking.

During check-in, the employee gave us a sheet with the hotel’s daily activities. We asked what the penguin parade was, and that’s when we learned the hotel has several African penguins living in a pool in the lobby.

Like all penguins, this species dives for food in the open sea — something the hotel can’t provide, meaning the habitat here is inadequate by default. That’s compounded by the fact the pool is just a few feet deep, meaning it’s unnatural for these penguins’ instincts, as they regularly dive for food at depths of 80 feet and remain underwater for a full minute in their natural environment.

A sign near the enclosure mentioned that the hotel has housed penguins for over 40 years and that all of the current residents were born at the hotel. This doesn’t change the fact that the living quarters aren’t adequate for these animals’ habits.

The hotel had other avian species, as well. Ironically, there was an Amazon green parrot — the species my wife wrote her veterinary thesis on during vet school. Her thesis was about identifying signs of distress and unhealthy diets in these birds. And this bird was displaying signs of distress during our visit, pacing around the enclosure rapidly.

Even if that wasn’t happening, these birds typically fly up to 100 miles a day while searching for food. Average speeds? From 40 to 50 miles per hour. And now this bird is living in a cage the size of a broom closet when its natural instinct is to fly dozens of miles per day. It’s a bad setup.

The same can be said for this cockatoo — an animal that would fly up to 60 miles in a day under normal conditions.

The hotel also had a grey parrot, which is considered one of the smartest animals in the world. Instead of living its normal life, we saw a guide trying to force it to repeat phrases for children during one of the hotel’s on-site activities.

Outside, near the pool, we spotted a grey crowned crane in a Plexiglas enclosure. These birds are native to eastern Africa and prefer to live in wet habitats, like marshes. Instead, this creature is living in a dry spot and without the flock it’s become adapted to over millions of years of evolution. One of the main behaviors of these birds is hunting for small worms and insects as they walk through marshes — something the hotel isn’t providing.

The hotel did have some birds that lived outside in the grass between the ocean, pool, and meeting areas. There was a black swan floating in a stream. It had an open area, unlike some other animals.

These 2 white swans, found nearby, were penned in by fencing.

Yes, the hotel’s animals were beautiful. The problem was that none of them had a sufficient environment. They received no consideration as living beings and were instead kept here for the entertainment of guests.

Moreover, with exotic animals — especially parrots — this normalizes the idea that they could be kept in cages as pets, meaning hotel guests get the idea that they should buy one when they get home and keep it in a cage in their living room. That keeps illegal wildlife smuggling alive, despite the efforts of law enforcement.

To be clear, I could be wrong about the animals at the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa. Maybe all of them were rescued from abusive situations, saved from the brink of death, and now live in safety at the hotel. If that were the case, though, the hotel would probably say so in its materials and would try to release the penguins into the wild after they were born at the property.

The sign near the parrot enclosure, for example, said that the hotel’s goal “is to connect guests with personalized educational experiences that inspire actions to save wildlife.” That just isn’t happening; it’s not what people take away from seeing a parrot in a hotel lobby. Anyone who has worked or volunteered with wildlife knows better. More likely, what’s happening is that guests take a cute picture with nothing educational involved.

As it stands, the hotel’s description of its sustainability efforts felt hypocritical, as it’s also participating in activities that continue the cycle of illegal wildlife trafficking by fostering the idea that buying wild animals to admire in your home is normal.

Final Thoughts

I’ve emailed my Hyatt Concierge for a list of Hyatt properties with captive animals living at the hotel. I’ll make sure to not book any of those. If we had known the Hyatt Regency Maui Hotel and Resort had cranes, parrots, and penguins living there, we wouldn’t have booked this hotel.

But even if you subtracted that element, we still found several aspects of our stay subpar. The check-in experience and disappearing car were weird, the slamming doors were annoying, and the lounge’s breakfast offerings were disappointing.

If or when we return to Maui someday, we’ll look for a different place to stay.