Usually, the destinations of my trips are based on the current plane ticket offers, but this one was an exception, as it was a birthday present to my partner. I had spent three months in Hawaii six years ago and desired to go back at some point in my life. And it made perfect sense to do it now.
When planning such a long-distance and long stay (we stayed for almost a month), I focused on the two biggest investments at first: flights and accommodation. Prior to booking the tickets, I had kept my eye on both prices for a couple of weeks. Once I understood what the extra cheap campaign prices, normal prices and expensive prices were for the flights, I knew, when was a good time to book the tickets.
Hawaii is the most expensive state in the US to live in. What we would have spent on accommodation travelling in Europe, wouldn’t have provided us even a tent place in Hawaii. So we knew we would rather not make any other big investments before the trip. Because we still wanted to not worry much about money when on a vacation.
When looking at apartments, I found it surprising that most of the kitchens were equipped usually with a microwave, and maybe a small countertop oven, but not with a hot plate. And pretty often, the microwave and oven were placed on a random cupboard table. As we knew we will be making a lot of food at our Hawaiian home, that was a must.
Hawaii consists of 8 major islands, the biggest one being named Big Island aka Hawaii. To be noted, that the capital Honolulu isn’t on the biggest one, but on island O’ahu, where we stayed. During our trip, there were a lot of questions about if we were going to visit the other islands, too, which at one point we considered. Still, as every island is different from the others, we decided to leave that idea this time aside, but hopefully do it in the future.
In Honolulu, there’s a world-famous beach town Waikiki. It’s a rather small district but packed with luxury hotels, boutiques and restaurants. When choosing a desired apartment location, I was looking for something nearby Waikiki. We found an Airbnb close to Waikiki and Diamond Head. It was a two-story home, where the host’s family lived on the second floor, and there were 3 Airbnb apartments on the ground floor. It had a walking distance to the beach as well as Waikiki, so the location was perfect for us!
For the whole month, we stayed in that apartment. I recommend using Airbnb for longer stays as it offers a very good discount on at least 30-day bookings. To be honest, we booked the apartment for a month, even though we knew we will leave a couple of days earlier because budget-wise it just made sense.
Some other homework I did was to map all hikes, must-see and visit places on a Google Maps list. That gave us a very good overview of where we want to go. As the island isn’t big, approximately an hour by car to go from South to North, it wasn’t a problem to have one accommodation throughout the trip.
You can look at the Google Maps saved locations below:
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