Nuts For The Beach!

Hawaii’s Ka’anapali Beach Hotel draws multigenerational guests and new visitors to its independent, authentic offering

Creating the ultimate authentic Hawaii guest experience can be a hard nut to crack for any hospitality business. It requires an innate appreciation for the environment, the culture, guest expectations, a spectacularly beautiful property and a team grounded in Hawaii’s traditions, stories and world-famous welcomes. The Ka’anapali Beach Hotel in Lahaina on Maui didn’t simply crack this nut. The team there literally and figuratively set it alight!

The indigenous kukui nut (occasionally referred to as Candlenut) has long held special significance in Hawaiian culture as it serves as a guiding light for the safe passage for travelers as they sail between the islands. The Ka’anapali Beach Hotel has made the kukui nut central to its brand. A kukui nut lei is indeed the hotel’s logo and is a central part of celebrating guests and team members — both are adorned with kukui nut leis and receive a white nut for each stay or each year of service respectively.

“Our people are essential to a positive guest experience,” says Kongbay Moua, Marketing Manager, Ka’anapali Beach Hotel. “If we hire the right people and share our ideal of Hawaiian hospitality based on respect and appreciation, then we can create a culture that exemplifies the Hawaiian spirit and is a fitting tribute to the majesty of the setting. We have found that this approach helps retain the very best people who, in turn, create lasting, positive guest experiences.”

In fact, Moua explains that the team at Ka’anapali Beach Hotel includes several employees with tenures exceeding 30, 40 and even 50 years, and a guest community that includes multigenerational guests and others who have come to the property each year for successive decades.

“If you could measure employee attachment and engagement it might well be by tenure and, likewise, if you sought to quantify the strength of the guest experience it might be the number of return visits. In each case, the Ka’anapali Beach Hotel is exceptional and I think that’s something we do not take for granted but work hard to sustain,” Moua adds.

Located beachside in gorgeous Lahaina, in West Maui, the Ka’anapali Beach Hotel is set in extensive tropical gardens and features 432 guestrooms and suites in four wings. Two of the wings underwent an ambitious $75m renovation that was completed in July 2021 and also includes a magnificent new oceanfront restaurant, Huihui. Refurbished guestrooms in the new wings feature LG hospitality 55UT340H televisions operating on LG Pro:Centric™ server.

“When you have a precious guest experience you want to protect it,” Moua says. “That means looking at every detail of the guestrooms and the shared spaces. The LG hospitality televisions look and perform at a very high level and enable us to provide personalized guest experiences and maintain our operational efficiency because they’re so reliable.”

Given the natural beauty of the setting and the range of outdoor activities available at or around the Ka’anapali Beach Hotel, one could be forgiven for thinking that guestroom televisions may not be a critical feature of the property, but Moua points out that the makeup and activeness of the guest community means happily-exhausted families, trail-weary hikers and sunbaked ocean-goers often retire early in front of their guestrooms televisions in advance of the next day’s adventures.

“Guestrooms televisions are never considered essential until they don’t work,” Moua says. “We typically never have that problem with LG. And for an island-property with limited access to replacement inventory that’s very important.”

A deep connection with nature means that the Ka’anapali Beach Hotel places a high emphasis on sustainability. This is a worldview shared by LG Electronics and according to Nicole Charleton, LG Electronics Commercial Displays Division, Hospitality Sales Account Manager, this means designing and building televisions in a sustainable way; ensuring the televisions perform in an energy-efficient manner and looking after end-of-life product with responsible programs.

“The culture at the Ka’anapali Beach Hotel is strikingly strong,” Charleton notes. “Everyone I have met in the Ka’anapali organization shares a deep appreciation for the gift of this beautiful location and the gift of nature. At LG we also make every effort to make a positive impact on our environment and our community and it’s very encouraging to see the impact of our dual efforts in this magical property.”

Moua agrees. “Culture is important internally, but we have found that it’s also very important to work with vendors and third-parties who are also aligned with our community and our values. LG listens and they innovate based on our needs, then they support us with clever, committed people like Nicole and her colleagues. It’s a partnership that comes very naturally.”

As the global hospitality business rebounds, Moua and his colleagues at the Ka’anapali Beach Hotel are confident that the bright light of the kukui nut will indeed serve as a guide and as inspiration for fellow travelers in the global hospitality community.

“Trust yourself, trust your team, trust your partners to be true to themselves, and the guest experience will naturally be authentic, grounded in culture and strong,” Moua says. “That’s our philosophy in a nutshell!”