Benjamin Thomas
Jun 2026
★☆☆☆☆
They filmed the first season of The White Lotus here. I knew that going in — figured it'd be a fun little flex, something to drop at dinner. What I did NOT expect was the resort committing to the bit. Because if you've seen the show, the whole premise is beautiful people having a quietly catastrophic time at a stunning resort where management is somehow always the actual problem. Reader: I lived it. On my birthday. The theme song should've been playing the whole time.
Let's start there, since this was a birthday trip — the one occasion a year you'd assume a Four Seasons, the brand whose entire religion is "you should never have to ask," would just silently handle the details. Instead: check-in was extremely late. Fine, okay, I'm not going to torch the place over a slow front desk on its own. But THEN they put us in a room overlooking an active construction site. And the construction clocked in at 7am. Every. Single. Morning. Nothing says "happy birthday, valued guest" quite like a complimentary jackhammer alarm clock you didn't order and cannot snooze. I keep picturing whoever runs the room map looking at the one assignment that comes with a live demolition zone outside the window and going, "yeah — the birthday guy, give him that one."
And before anyone tells me I'm being dramatic: they already KNEW. They knew about the noise. I know they knew because they apologized for it afterward, in writing, unprompted. So this wasn't a surprise to anyone except the guy paying Four Seasons rates specifically so he wouldn't have to be surprised.
Now the gym, which deserves its own paragraph and arguably its own incident report. It is so hot in there it is borderline unusable. Not "a touch warm." Not "they forgot to crank the AC." Genuinely-cannot-train, shirt-stuck-to-your-back hot. And I want to be precise about how damning this is, because it's kind of my thing: I have used Four Seasons gyms all over the world, and this one is — hand on heart — the WORST I have ever set foot in. Dead last. Bottom of a very long list. How a property operating at this altitude lets a core amenity rot to that point and then just… shrugs at it, I will genuinely never understand.
Here's my actual problem with the whole thing. The staff were great. Disarmingly great. Warm, switched-on, the kind of people who make you feel like a jerk for being annoyed because you can tell THEY would've fixed every bit of this in a heartbeat if anyone above them had let them. (I'd poach half of them on the spot.) But the people stop being the product the moment management keeps whiffing the basics — where you put a guest, the noise you already apologized for in advance, an amenity that flat-out does not work. That's the front-of-house doing five-star work to cover for a back-of-house that didn't bother to show up.
And let me say something directly to my own people — the Lifetime Titaniums, the Ambassadors, anyone who lives and dies by their Marriott number and was eyeing this place as a points-be-damned splurge. Four Seasons doesn't even HAVE a loyalty program. No status to flash, no rewards line, no recognition, nothing — and that's fine, that's their whole model, you're paying for the name. But here's the stat that should stop you cold: I also stayed at the Ritz-Carlton up the coast on this same island, and that property had an actual, literal, lights-out POWER OUTAGE during my stay… and it was still a better experience than this place was on a normal day with the power fully on. Read that again. Four Seasons Wailea lost — to a Ritz in the middle of a blackout. So if you're a Marriott person debating whether to go off-brand for the splurge: don't. You're better off staying at the Ritz on this island, and that's me saying it after I gave the Ritz one star too.
At normal-hotel money this is a bad week. At Four Seasons money, on a birthday, in the literal White Lotus hotel, it's not a miss — it's a choice somebody made. Several somebodies. The cast was lovely. The writing was tragic. One star, and I mean it with the full White Lotus theme playing behind me.
