#2 in Top 20 Maui for A Family Holiday · ★★★★★
Grand Wailea, A Waldorf Astoria Resort
Hibiscus Pool maze with longest waterslides on the island — the children's-pool benchmark.
Hibiscus Pool maze with longest waterslides on the island — the children's-pool benchmark.
"Hibiscus Pool maze with longest waterslides on the island — the children's-pool benchmark."
Grand Wailea opened in 1991 as the Hyatt Regency Grand Wailea and was rebranded as Waldorf Astoria in 2014 (the property remains under Hilton ownership). Seven hundred and seventy-six rooms across multiple buildings, the upper-tier Napua Tower operating as a hotel-within-a-hotel with private check-in and butler service. The asset is the Hibiscus Pool complex — nine pools across 25,700 square feet, including the longest hotel waterslide on Maui (the 600-foot Volcano Slide), a children's water-feature pool with a beach entry, a lazy river, and the Wailea-Beach-fronting infinity pool. The pool layout is the working children's-asset benchmark of the entire Hawaiian Islands and is the single most-recognisable family-resort visual on Maui. Camp Grande is the kids'-club programme; the Spa Grande is one of the largest hotel spas in Hawaii at 50,000 square feet. Grand Wailea is the right pick for the family holiday where the children's pool complex is the explicit working asset of the trip — the eleven-year-old's day is the Volcano Slide, the four-year-old's day is the children's-feature pool, and the parents' day is the lazy river with the cocktail in hand. The trade-off is scale (the resort is the largest on Maui at 776 rooms) — the working family hotel rather than the boutique experience.
Napua Tower King Suite (the hotel-within-a-hotel upgrade) or Two-Bedroom Suite for the family-of-four flagship.
Book the Volcano Slide for the eleven-year-old early in the trip — the slide is busiest 11am-2pm, get there at 9.30am. Camp Grande is the working kids' club for the morning programme. The Napua Tower is worth the upgrade for the private pool and butler service away from the main resort scale.
Grand Wailea, A Waldorf Astoria Resort sits within our broader Top 20 Hotels in Maui for a Family Holiday list. It scored an aggregate 9.8/10 across the three editorial criteria — competitive against the field but, on a family holiday-specific factors, the angle above is what earned its rank. For the alternatives in the same Maui neighbourhood, see Wailea, south coast and adjacent. For a different city entirely, see the related lists below.
If you have already chosen the dates, our editor recommends booking the room twelve weeks ahead. The best suites with the right view orientation go first, and inventory for the popular months is quoted in months, not weeks. Suite-level rooms with private plunge pools or terraces — the ones that earn this rank — are typically the first to sell out.