Started with your PRICELINE link.
Thanks to the info posted here, I began bidding at $100/night and won on the first try. Price breakdown is as follows:
7 nights at $100/night = $700.00 + $114.03 tax = $814.03. That is up from $70 only a couple years ago. There is a$31.25/day including tax resort fee that is disclosed only on Sheraton's web site, so the real price is $131.25/night plus taxes and fees, making the total $1132.78 for the week. The resort fee is just a way to advertise a false room price. It buys nothing of value except Internet service, but hotels in Hawaii typically charge for parking and it covers that. Hawaii hotels charge for parking even if it is on the ground, not in a parking garage, or if the lot is too small for a full hotel's worth of cars (this hotel has plenty of spaces, but the Royal Kona Resort, a 3* Priceline hotel in Kailua, does not). Sheraton instituted the resort fee and it has tripled in just a few years. Dishonesty is very popular.
A little info on the area since we have been there so much: We have been to this hotel about 30 times in the last 35 years, from back when it was a very nice place called the Kona Surf. About thirty years ago a new resort area called Waikaloa was created on an ocean front lava flow about 35 miles north of Kailua. Several very nice resort hotels, I don't know how many golf courses and tons of high dollar condos were built. That drew traffic away from the Kona Surf and it began to have trouble despite sitting on the best piece of land on the west coast of the Big Island. It sold to a Japanese company that bought it for its golf course (there has long been a ban on construction of new ones) and as a place to put up people on their tours. It began to show lack of maintenance. The public areas went down and down over time, hotel shops closed, plantings got ever sparser, flowering plants disappeared, tiki lamps remained unlit at night, surfaces peeled off stair steps, etc. Sheraton bought it a few years ago. They did a nice make over for about $19 million as I recall, prices tripled to the point where a Garden Room is $169 (+, +). The hotel has several hundred rooms and Waikaloa continues to draw people away, so occupancy has never been high for Sheraton. Be aware that occasional high surf can make the ground and the ocean front rooms on it tremble when they hit, then cover everything with salt spray.
The make over was a good one and there are very nice pools, a water slide, bars, a spectacular view of the coastline to the north, a great place to watch turtles in the day and occasionally manta rays on nights when the tour boats hover only 100' off shore, put lights underwater and tourist divers feed the rays. You can watch the them do barrel rolls and loops around the divers in the clear water. The sun still sets straight off the coastline.
Rooms are large and furnished nicely, but bathrooms are sometimes criticized for being small, which they are in relation to the very big rooms, but in fact they are average size. These days with Priceline, we get only a real garden view room regardless of how many rooms are unoccupied, and Garden is a step below even Mountain View. Mountain sees no water, but has long views up the volcano and to the sides. Garden sees a short view of trees, grass, a small pool and a tennis court. When I inquired about paying to upgrade to Mountain they quoted me the full difference between what I'd paid Priceline and the rack rate, over $100 additional per night.
The parking lot is a hike (the near section of it is reserved for Valet) with some fairly steep stairs, but there is a secret tunnel that avoids the stairs. The lot is well lighted and in good condition. Staff is nice and maid service is good. The breakfast buffet is big and looks very nice. Lots of local fruit. Hawaiian grown pineapple is a different animal from what we get stateside. It's very sweet and you should eat about ten pounds of it while you're there. You can buy all kinds of fruit cheap at the farmer's market in Kailua at the intersection of Alii Dr and Hualalai Rd.
Hawaii, the island, is called the Big Island to distinguish it from Hawaii, the state. Kona is an AREA, the west side of the Big Island, not a town. Kailua is the coastal town about in the middle of Kona, eight miles south of the main Kona airport (KOA), listed as Kona on flight schedules, but really named Keahole Airport. Everyone just calls it Kona. Keauhou, where the Sheraton lies, is a tiny area about six miles south of Kailua, near a nice shopping center with restaurants, groceries, movies, drug store, PO and shops. We greatly prefer Keauhou-Kailua's location to the newish Waikaloa resort area so far to the north. The six miles between Keauhou and Kailua is a wonderfully scenic 30 mph oceanside drive. The weather is sunny. Waikaloa is so far up the coast that is getting into the cloudy weather zone. Every island has the same weather zones; sunny south and west; cloudy, rainy and windy northwest thru northeast; cloudy and windy east; sunny and windy south, sunny southwest and west. Kailua is straight west and Waikaloa is near the north end of the west side. As you go up the west coast you transition from sunny to cloudy. Kailua is sunnny and Waikaloa is starting to get cloudy. Not all the time, but clouds frequently make it cold for swimming and make sun bathing impossible. Mornings there are generally sunny, but it is generally cloudy from late morning until the western sun dips under the coastal clouds in mid afternoon. That is not my cup of Hawaiian tea. Worse, Waikaloa is totally isolated. The nearest town of consequence is Waimea, a twenty mile drive. Waimea is a ranching town in the cloudy, cold uplands (take a jacket and don't wear shorts), with only a couple good restaurants that we have ever found. In Waikaloa you have only their shopping, their restaurants, their convenience stores, their grocery store, their spectacularly overpriced hotel restaurants and their $1/gal higher than everywhere else gas station. Hawaiian gasoline is already about $1.25/gallon higher than on the mainland. Quality and service are variable because there will always be more people flying in who will to try them the next day, no matter how they're treated today. In town word travels, so service is pretty decent and prices are low. We have Walmart to thank for the low retail prices. Their merchandise is priced at mainland + only 5%. Those prices knocked the pins out from under all the Yamaguchi Market type stores selling at triple mainland prices for so many years, citing high transportation costs as the reason. Lack of competition was the real reason. There is even a Costco about five miles north of town.
You can spend $50pp on food in Kailua, but you don't have to. There are great restaurants with prices no higher than on the mainland if you look for them. We always eat Chinese... every night... it is so good.
Stay away from places not frequented by tourists. Tourism is Hawaii's biggest business, so they want your money, but most Hawaiians don't want the people who bring it.
