You and your friends had a great couples’ getaway vacation week in Hawaii together last year. You stayed at a nice hotel with a lovely pool and fun vibe. You and your spouse had your own room and your friends’ room was just a coconut’s roll down the hall. You met whenever you could time it right for breakfasts, lunches, happy hours and dinners at various restaurants in town or down at the pool. You also teased each other about who was calling home the most to ask the babysitter about the kids. The sitters’ fees combined with the phone bills, the dining out receipts for every meal, and the solo room charges gave you some unpleasant sticker shock, but hey, it was Hawaii!
Then you read a blog post about Koloa Landing Resort on the sunny South Shore of Kauai, saw some photos of its enormous multi-bedroom villas — and a lightbulb went off . . .
Flash forward a year later. Today, you and your same friends are living up the best getaway vacation together at Koloa Landing Resort — on the glorious Garden Isle of Kauai. This time, however, you made some changes and they are paying off — literally.
Room price
First of all, both couples are sharing one 3-bedroom villa, thereby splitting the cost. Surprisingly, your portion ends up being much less than the single room price you paid at last year’s hotel, even though your KLR villa boasts a whopping 2700 square feet of living space. That’s way more than both your last year’s hotel rooms combined. Each couple gets their own bedroom with a walk-in closet, huge windows, and high-end furnishings and linens. Some bedrooms even feature a massive al fresco lanai. Like all villas at Koloa Landing, each bedroom is not only uncommonly spacious, but also includes an ensuite bathroom with its own large bathtub or shower — or both.
What about the third bedroom you ask? That brings us to point two:
Babysitting fees
Because the villas in Kauai are so spacious with multiple bedrooms, you were able to bring the kids! In fact, your kids and your friends’ kids are sharing the 3rd bedroom and it’s like a sleepover every night. There could even be spillover to the luxurious convertible couch. Bye-bye babysitting fees — not to mention how much more memorable and satisfying it is to have your family with you. Even the airfares cost less than what you had to shell out to the babysitter to leave the kids at home.
But what happens when all those little mouths get hungry? Isn’t that expensive?
Dining out costs
After lodging and airfare, dining out usually eats up the lion’s share of your vacation spending. If you have to hit a restaurant every time you’re hungry, that adds up in a hurry. Each Koloa Landing villa comes complete with a fabulous gourmet kitchen. The one in your particular 3-bedroom villa turns out to be bigger than your kitchen at home, and it is stocked with all you could possibly wish for in a kitchen: A SubZero fridge, a Wolf Range, oodles of counter space and deep drawers filled with everything from a blender and pasta pots to a wine opener and an egg whisk. This means that you don’t have to rush out to a restaurant for every meal or snack, which in turn means a huge savings to your wallet. Now you fill your fridge with fresh local fruits and vegetables and satisfying snacks for all the peeps in your villa — not to mention some limes, spirits and other cocktail fixings for extra fun happy hours on your private lanai. On two of the nights you couples take turns whipping up dinner for each other’s families, and the most fun meal of the trip turns out to be when you marinate some fresh local catch of the day in your fridge and then gather at the barbecues down at the Family Lagoon Pool for a poolside dinner under the stars! The festive and complimentary s’mores event on the resort’s lawn is the crowning glory.
Other savings
If you don’t have kids (or just prefer not to bring them) this Villa Savings Theory works perfectly well with a 2-bedroom villa. Another great getaway vacation option: grab a third fun couple to share the 3-bedroom villa for REALLY steep savings! Also, worth mentioning: Each villa boasts a full-sized washer and dryer right off the great room so you can easily keep up with the laundry — allowing you to pack light and even save on baggage fees. You can’t get that in a hotel.
When you tally up your budgets you are pleased by how much more bang you’ve gotten for your buck this time around. This means having the funds for that big catamaran tour up the Napali Coast — complete with spinner dolphins putting on a show for you.
And that, of course, is priceless.
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Grab some friends and book your multi-bedroom villa for that perfect getaway vacation at Koloa Landing Resort, the best Kauai beach resort, today. How much can you save?
— Erica Karlin