The Way the .01 Percent Lives Now

Les Firestein is a Hollywood screenwriter who had brought his family to Hualalai as hotel guests for years. “It’s extravagant, but they deliver,” he says. “You know you’re going to have a perfect time.” Last summer a friend who owned a home there offered him free use of his place for a week. Firestein said yes. Then he quickly learned that if he wanted to do anything at the resort beyond hanging out at his friend’s house, he had to pay daily “unaccompanied guest” fees–$150 for adults and $75 each for his two children. The fee gave Firestein pause, but only briefly. “Right off the top, we’re paying $450 a day,” he says. “But then again, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s the Four Seasons. We’ll suck it up.’ ” Firestein then learned that even after paying the fee, his family wasn’t entitled to the same access as hotel guests. “It was like there were two systems of privilege operating at the same time,” he says. He wasn’t permitted to reserve a table at any of the restaurants between 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. He had to show a guest ID card everywhere–“like, ‘Show me your papers,’ ” he says, still annoyed. “I don’t want to exaggerate, but it really is an apartheid experience” It was poolside that he particularly felt the caste system at work. “You’d go to a pool and order what you want,” he says. “And then, when you make the mistake of sitting in the wrong seat, a Hualalai brownshirt basically comes over and says, ‘You can’t sit there.’ And there was literally no one else near the pool because it was kind of drizzling. It was just bizarre.” … He didn’t know it at the time, but he was encountering a new policy enacted by Hualalai Resorts, Dell’s management company on the ground. It has three prongs: First is the complex schedule of steep resort access fees based on the time of year and the relationship of the guest to the homeowner (sons and daughters are OK; nieces and nephews, friends, and renters have to pay). Next there’s a status hierarchy for making dinner reservations at any of the restaurants. Finally there’s the rule governing the use of the chaises longues by the pools, which the Firesteins encountered at its most cognitively dissonant moment, on a deserted pool deck in the rain…

Tension over the policy boiled over in August, when three executives from Hualalai Resorts convened a special meeting of the Hualalai Homeowners Association to announce the resort was increasing the peak-period unaccompanied guest fee to $250 and expanding the periods to several months of the year. The steep fee, they said, was meant to make it harder for people to rent out their homes–something they argued was happening more and more frequently and clogging up the hotel’s amenities. “A family of four is staring down the gun barrel of $1,000 a day before you ever pay for anything else, like rent,” says Taber Anderson, a longtime homeowner. With a surcharge like that, why would anyone rent a place at all? The goal, the executives said, was to protect what they called Hualalai’s “experience of exclusivity,” according to those who attended. No one in the room disputed that exclusivity deserved to be protected. But no one in management seemed to care that some homeowners, those who rent their places for several months out of the year, could lose tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual rental income–or that everyone’s resale values might plummet once prospective buyers learn about the extra charge for anyone who rents. Days after the meeting, Sandra Holstead, a homeowner since 2004, told a Hualalai executive she might be able to find at least a few people willing to pay the $250 fee. “Maybe the fees would have to be higher then,” she says the executive replied… . “This may sound like a battle of the 1 percent vs. the .001 percent over a bunch of beach chairs,” says Zyda, who decries the resort’s “Gestapo tactics.” “But there are very real contract issues at hand. I’ve heard homeowners say the agenda is to drive all the homeowners out.”