Travel&Vacation

The first time the Houskas vacationed at Kona Village on the Big Island of Hawaii, Judy Houska was pregnant with her first child. The next year, they celebrated Joe Houska’s 40th birthday. Then it was Joe and Judy’s 10th anniversary.

“We finally admitted that we would go every year because it was where we wanted to be with our family more than any place in the world,” said Joe, who lives in Berkeley, California, and has now been vacationing at Kona Village for more than 20 years.

Consider yourself extremely lucky if you have such a special vacation place in your life. Maybe it’s a small resort on Cape Cod. Maybe it’s a Minnesota lakefront, a certain ski town, or a favorite camping spot. Maybe it’s a place where you vacationed as a child and that you now share with your kids.

While other resort hotels routinely change their images and owners, and expand their spas and their pools, Kona Village, built on the site of an old Hawaiian fishing village along the Kohala Coast, has been an icon here for more than 40 years. Luckily, Kona Village and other nearby hotels sustained no damage from the October earthquake that occurred northwest of the Big Island. All are operating as usual.

And just as your own favorite vacation spot wouldn’t please everyone, neither would Kona Village. Though it’s as expensive as the swankiest Hawaiian resort—all-inclusive rates can run more than $800 a night for a family of four— there is no air conditioning, no television, no high-speed Internet, and no phones (guests are asked to limit cell phone use to their rooms). There are thatched-roof bungalows called “hales” where a painted coconut serves as a do-not-disturb sign. Giant sea turtles laze on the beach. Forget dinner reservations. At breakfast you’re asked which of the two dining rooms you would prefer and what time you want to eat.

The resort is small: just 125 hales and a world away from Hawaii’s mega-resorts, where it’s necessary to stake out a beach chair early in the morning.

“It’s less show-and-tell and more about having a good time,” said Arlene Abergel, a longtime Kona Village aficionado from Los Angeles.

That ambiance—the two-person hammocks strung in the trees, the exotic birds, the solitude, the gorgeous beach on Kahuwai Bay, the complimentary tennis clinics, and, most important, the chance to experience what Hawaii once was like—is what draws families back again and again (70 percent of visitors are repeat guests).

“There are difficult moments, certainly,” Joe Houska said in an email after vacationing at Kona Village with his sons after his wife’s death. “But not going there would be a bit like not going back to the home where Judy and I raised our sons. There are at least 30 staff members who we consider friends. I don’t know of many places where the bellman can say ‘welcome home’ and have it be meant and accepted with such sincerity.”

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