See the latest delay on reopening without Kauai Resort Bubbles.
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Home » Blog » Hawaii Travel Tips » Kauai Not Reopening Travel Soon + Kauai Resort Bubbles And More
I’m not doing either! Who wants to pay for two tests? Who wants to go to Kauai where so many things will be closed because the Mayor doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing? We’re going to the other islands and hope that Kauai survives this madness.
Resort bubbles or another island for 3 days does not work for us. This is ridiculous. We own timeshare on Kauai and that is where we go. We are scheduled for the first two weeks of April. If this doesn’t change by then we will be canceling. If their policy doesn’t become reasonable soon we will be letting our timeshare 4 weeks in Kauai go. This is just too much.
We own at The Point at Po’ipu and are staying there five weeks. This couldn’t have worked out better for us. Now we get in, get through the administrative pageantry of entry to Kaua’i, grab a shuttle from LIH to The Point (already reserved), check-in, get our trackers, and head to our unit. It is like a load has been taken off my shoulders: don’t have to change our reservations at The Point, don’t have to make reservations at the Marriott and no additional expenses for the Marriott.
Aloha! How much interaction is there between guests at a resort bubble? It just doesn’t make sense to me that you could be interacting with people who just arrived, while you are on your last day. Therefore, you could be contracting Covid from the folks with whom you are sharing the resort bubble. Since it could take a week to 10 days for symptoms, that second test before you get out of jail would be worthless in my opinion. What am I missing here?
Who is going to go through these gymnastics & expense to vacation on Kauai? There are so many other places to vacation, and I feel so awful for the businesses in Kauai. They must be suffering.
Businesses suffering? We had dinner (and too many drinks) last night at a restaurant in Hanalei. The manager tells us that pre-shut down, they normally did $12K-$15K a day in receipts. Nowadays, they are lucky to get $2K (we did our part).
However, the trades and landscapers are on fire. Construction and remodels are booming, along with the red hot real estate market. The yellow shirt guys are out everywhere. Instead of helicopter noise pollution, we have chain saw and chipper noise pollution. Speaking of which, we needed to rent a chipper. Called every place on the island; all rented out and they have waiting lists. Found a guy to haul it and burn it on his own land.
So, depends on the line of work. Rents are going up, scarcity. I see a S-ton of out of state (mostly CA) license plates, way more than usual (this observation has also been made by the blog authors). Even at the dump, I mean, “transfer station,” there was a dude driving a sedan with CA plates picking through the “stuff”. Lots of young people living on couches of other young people. Maybe even old people. We know a lady in her late 60s or early 70s who says she has family and her own “MIL” condo in Las Vegas, but she prefers to live in her car/camping down at Anini, rather than go back. And I don’t think its all about the virus.
The net result of this is that the island will be even more divided between the mainland haves and the local have nots. I don’t know know if all the recent transplants know what they are getting into.
Looney Tunes..and how much are they charging per day to rent the ankle cuff?
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I hope that those traveling by June who are fully vaccinated such as myself will be able to visit. We cancelled our Hawaii trip twice last year. This year we are getting g married and wanted to go to Maui and Kaui. We are afraid to even book anything right now. Too many places not offering refunds if you cancel or forcing you to buy travel insurance so the insurance company pays you back and not them.
My husband and I used the “stay on another island first” method for Safe Travels to Kauai and can highly recommend it as a pleasant and fairly non-restrictive experience.
We took an ID NOW test AFC in South Portland, Maine on 12/31, and received our negative results the same day. We uploaded our information to Safe Travels, answered the survey and flew from Boston to HNL on 1/3 (wearing our N95 masks and face shields, not eating or drinking on the way). On landing we stood in the line in HNL and eventually our printed test results and our printed QR codes were checked. (Unclear whether having uploaded them to Safe Travels was useful). We took a taxi to our short term rental on Waikiki beach and enjoyed long walks on the beach and wonderful food in outdoor dining establishments over the next 4 days. Mask compliance in Waikiki was very high.
On 1/6, just after the time of our original flight arrival we took tests at Urgent Care Hawaii at Ala Moana Blvd (a 2 minute walk from our condo). The testing staff delivered our negative results in PDF form and as a printout while we waited (around 15 minutes). We then filled out the next Safe Travels form and walked to Fedex Office in Honolulu to get the QR code printed out. It wasn’t possible to upload the test results to Safe Travels so we kept the printouts all carefully. On 1/7 we flew to LIH from HNL (again masked with N95s and face shields) where our QR code and test result printouts were compared with our ID by the very friendly US Army and Police representatives (in a much smaller line than at HNL) and we were pronounced free to go to our chosen accommodation. Off we went, no quarantine required. We’ve snorkeled, hiked and dined outdoors and enjoyed our freedom.
Had we flown directly to Kauai (unless resort bubbled) we would just be getting out of quarantine tomorrow.
Thanks to Beat of Hawaii for giving the best/fastest information on available options which meant we could pull this off successfully.
Hi Philippa.
Thanks for the report on how that worked for you. We appreciate it.
Aloha.
I have a question about travel restrictions. We have a 2 week trip on Kauai planned with 3 day resort bubble stay starting on Jan 17. Just found out my airline, American has suspended service until sometime in Feb. If we now try and fly to Kauai with a stop in HNL, only 2 hours on the ground-in the airport, can we still participate in the resort bubble option? Or do we have to stay 72hrs on other island and negative test before going on to Kauai. I have searched online and cannot find definitive answer.
The last time I checked, there were no longer any non-stop flights from the mainland to LIH. So, assuming that is still the case, I’d assume a layover is fine. I think that there are just not enough passengers flying to Kauai to make non-stop worthwhile for the airlines.
There appear to be non-stop LIH flights shown as available on flight search sites (depending on the day of the week, covering San Francisco, LAX or Seattle). The Safe Travels website shows where people are flying in from: hawaiicovid19.com/travel/data/
We are flying Delta LAX/LIH on 1 March. Delta is also flying SEA/LAX
My neighbor just did it. No direct flights. Bubble, tested, out.