Inside the Grand Club at the Grand Hyatt Kauai Resort and Spa
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Many hotels and resorts have club lounges available to select guests, and one of the better hotel club lounges in the United States can be found at the Grand Hyatt Kauai Resort and Spa on the sunny Poipu side of the island. Points-loving families flock to using their World of Hyatt and transferred Chase Ultimate Rewards points to book award rooms at this resort. Those who want to make their stays even better use additional points and elite status to access the resort's Grand Club in order to have easy access to drinks, snacks and more.
Read the full review of the Grand Hyatt Kauai.
Whether you book a club level room for 33,000 Hyatt points per night, use an annual Hyatt Explorist certificate to gain access or are lucky enough to have Hyatt Globalist status that gets you in the door, here is what to expect in the Grand Club at the Grand Hyatt Kauai. (And remember that you can transfer points at a 1:1 ratio from Chase Ultimate Rewards and cards such as the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card).
Location
Know that the Grand Hyatt Kauai is a very large resort. The club lounge is on the third floor in the wing furthest away from the pool area, the Poipu Wing. The third floor sounds like it's a few floors above the ground, but because of elevation changes and various levels around the resort, you can actually walk right outside from the lounge to eat or drink outside on what seems to be the ground floor.
Be aware that staying near the Club Lounge means you are easily a 10-to-15-minute walk from the base of the pool area.
The lounge was expanded in the last year or two to include seating in an additional area, but while the physical space was larger and more inviting than ever, the menu seemed to have shrunk a little bit.
The Grand Club hours were:
- Continental breakfast from 6:30am to 10am
- Afternoon snacks from 12pm to 4pm
- Cocktails and hors d'oeuvres from 5pm to 7pm
- Cordials and desserts from 7:30pm to 8:30pm
Food and Beverage
The most useful meal of the day in a club lounge is typically breakfast, and that was indeed the case here. It was super simple to start your day without any meal costs by loading up on fruit, coffee, juice, eggs and pastries.
The consistent items in the lineup included a section with hard-boiled eggs, mixed greens, tomatoes and smoked salmon.
Next, there was a fresh-fruit area with sliced pineapple, papaya and watermelon.
One of my favorite parts of the breakfast spread was the sliced meats, such as prosciutto, along with various cheeses and crackers. Add a slice of papaya to that mix, and -- voila! -- my favorite.
During our recent four-night stay, breakfast remained 95% consistent at the Grand Hyatt Kauai lounge. The main variation was that one of the two hot dishes changed daily. Scrambled eggs were a constant, but the other dish varied from biscuits and gravy to fried rice to pancakes.
My kids loved the sugary, carb-loaded pastry box with muffins, breads and other baked treats. OK, I loved it, too.
In a center island was miso soap and mix-ins.
Another portion of the lounge was home to the bagels and breads you could send through the conveyer-belt toaster. You could also find yogurt and cereal boxes.
To drink, there was a juice dispenser, with four options: apple, orange, pineapple and guava. There were also canned sodas available (Pepsi products), a fancy coffee machine (with Kauai coffee) and bottles of water -- though those popular items emptied out as breakfast came to a close, so you had to grab water bottles when you entered, if you needed them.
In the evenings, you could make a meal out of what was served at the club lounge (and we totally did on some nights), though I wouldn't recommend doing that every night unless you're operating on a tight budget.
The evening offerings here just weren't quite as extensive as they were a few years ago, and there were too many other great food options in Kauai to limit yourself to lounge food every night. However, eating dinner in the lounge for a night or two of your trip was doable.
In the evening was a rotating hot item, such as shredded beef and items to make little sandwiches, or chicken satay, spring rolls, etc.
We also saw tortilla soup and cornbread.
There was likely to be basic salad offerings and sliced vegetables, fruit, chips and cheese -- great for appetizers, but not always enough for a full meal.
Note that unlike in some other Hawaii lounges (such as at the Moana Surfrider and the Sheraton Kona), evening alcohol was not complimentary in this lounge. At night, we found the same nonalcoholic drinks that were present in the morning but also wine and mixed drinks at an honor bar for around $5 per drink.
Dessert was still an evening standout, with little brownies and cakes out from 5pm to 7pm and some additional options appearing between 7pm and 7:30pm.
Overall Impression
I still very much recommend ensuring your family has lounge access at the Grand Hyatt Kauai. I'm not sure that the lounge offerings are quite as good from a food-and-beverage perspective as they were a few years ago, when we first visited, but it is still makes for a convenient way to start and potentially end the day. The staff in the lounge is also very kind and welcoming. The physical space is a nice place to relax, read the paper, play with games throughout the lounge and watch the sunset.
And if you get to chatting with folks in the lounge, I can guarantee that many of them are in the points-and-miles game, which makes for fun conversations.