Travel: Wait'll We Tell the Folks Back Home

Times must be tough for jaded travelers. There are not many places left on this earth that still confer bragging rights now that Katmandu has as many package tours as Atlantic City and darkest Africa is bright with flashbulbs. So just in time comes the spanking-new Hyatt Regency Waikoloa on the lee shore of the Big Island of Hawaii. At $360 million, it is the most expensive resort ever built. But that's not, even nearly, all.

Guests at the oceanside Hyatt are festooned with exotic flowers and offered colorful concoctions before they reach the check-in desk of the half-indoor, half-outdoor lobby. (What would you do with those lovely rugs after a driving rain? Replace them, replies the managing director, smug as a puffin.) To reach their rooms, guests can board a bullet-nosed monorail tram or take a boat along the canal that runs the mile-long stretch of the resort. Crispy captains in white shorts and knee socks pretend to steer, clanging the ship's bell, but the boat is actually guided by wheels running along a 19-in. groove underwater. "Disneyland changed the way people view entertainment," muses Amy Katoh, who is visiting Hawaii from Tokyo with her husband Yuichi. "And this place will change the way people think about resorts."

That is exactly what Hyatt had in mind. Hawaii, the sunshine's circus, attracts more American vacationers in winter than any other destination, and this hotel is fast becoming a main event. For their many millions, Hyatt transformed a stark moonscape of black lava rock with not so much as a sprig of vegetation into a 62-acre tropical garden, ringed by three towers, 1,241 rooms, seven restaurants, 75,000 sq. ft. of convention space, a 17,500-sq.-ft. health spa, 1,640 transplanted coconut-palm trees at $1,000 apiece and water everywhere else. The design is the work of Christopher Hemmeter, a sort of revolutionary in the resort business. His tastes run toward the liquid: private lagoons full of sociable fish, waterfalls, whirlpools, water slides and vast, curvaceous pools. Distinction lies in myriad details, like the seven bird keepers who ensure that the 27 pink flamingos get enough carotene in their diet so that they don't fade to beige.

But other resorts offer tropical splendors and offbeat birds. The Hyatt hunch is that today's travelers are in desperate search of an Experience, a made-to-order memory, and are willing to pay $265 a night for the average room to $2,500 for a presidential suite in order to find it. From that belief was born their Fantasy Resort, which promises to change the way many superluxe hotels do business. After much campfire brainstorming, the Waikoloa staff came up with a menu of activities, priced them fantastically and still cannot always keep up with demand. Though roughly half the guests at any given time are there on business, they still seem willing to spend whatever free time and discretionary income they have on making their trip memorable. "There's an ego boost in going home saying 'We took a helicopter to a remote spot and had a picnic just for two,' " observes Patrick Cowell, a regional vice president of Hyatt Resorts Hawaii and the hotel's managing director. "Can't you imagine that kind of story in the Des Moines bridge circle?"