Waikiki Marina

WARNING: Beware of hotels inoperable elevators! Will ruin your stay!
Floor 33 Room 3301 and the other 5 to 10 condo’s these owners own in the Waikiki Marina building.
The Waikiki Marina Building is also known as the Marina Tower right behind the Equus. There is no address on the listing because they don’t want you to read the hotel reviews on Unilocal. (Address: 1700 Ala Moana Boulevard Honolulu, Hawaii) They have very poor ratings due to poor maintenance, the elevators always breaking down and out of service! The Equus manages both buildings. They have very poor management and maintenance for both of these hotels! Very rude and unprofessional when trying to contact the owners, management and owner of the unit when you really need to speak with them!
The ONLY thing we loved about this place is the amazing panorama windows with spectacular breathtaking views of Waikiki beach and the marina from your amazingly comfortable bed! The room is very small! It is good for two people only! The shower was very small and awkward but it worked! Everything was very modern and up to date which we like! Who doesn’t! The bed was very comfortable but the sheets had blood stains on them! I even took pictures to have proof. So we had to sleep on top of the covers every night! The AC worked great which is a plus when staying on the 33^rd floor is humid Hawaii. There were two beach towels to use which was nice but when we went to go use them they were very old and dingy with holes in them. If you’re making all this money for your renters please break down and buy new beach towels. Also, if you are going to have your renters pay a cleaning fee please have new cleaned bed with new cleaned sheets not dried blood stains on supposedly clean sheets.
Also, this listing was falsely advertised on
. The owners did not specify that Elevator 1 would be out the entire time we were there which was 8 days. That leaves just 1 working elevator accommodating 40 floors! Every time we wanted to go up or down we waited a good 5 to 15 minutes in hot stuffy small tight hallways. Elevator 2 broke down 2 to 3 times while we were there! This forced us to walk down 33 flights of stairs if we wanted I go anywhere! On the last day as we were leaving to catch our flight back home Elevator 2 happened to be out of service and they were working on it. So NO elevators were working in the building! We didn’t have time to wait for it to be fixed not knowing how long it would take! We had to walk down 33 flights of stairs in hot stuffy hallways with all of our heavy luggage! Absurd! We first contacted the owners of the building and management and left three voice messages and NO ONE contacted us back! Very rude an unprofessional! To top it off we tried contacting the owner of the condo we rented from via phone, text and email and he didn’t even contact us back either! We happen to meet a few owners that owned a condo in this hotel and they said Elevator 1 has been out of service for the past 7 months and that Elevator 2 is always breaking down! At least 2 to 3 times a week or more! They need to SHUT down this hotel to figure out the problem with the elevators! (I have pictures for proof of the dates and times and proof that both elevators were out 2 to 3 times during our stay)
Bottom line is you will regret your stay here in this poorly maintenance hotel! Stay far away from this place! There are plenty of other places to stay in Waikiki!

This place is terrifying. It sways at night, the elevators feel like a death trap, and the windows just completely open at 32 stories, where you could fall out of them! As someone who is terrified of heights, I was miserable. I can deal with old furniture and dated appliances. But I can’t deal with my life feeling in danger when I’m supposed to be on a relaxing vacation.

I AM TERRIFIED OF ELEVATORS. THIS ELEVATOR HAD ME PRAYING and doing the Lamas Breathing Exercise saying Inch by Inch everything’s a Cinch, I had to trick my mind and say floor 1 to 2, only 1 floor, 2 to 3, only 1 floor, 3 to 4 only 1 floor up to the 32^nd floor. I’ve been stuck 3 times in an elevator and with this elevator being outside it does sway and get stuck. When we arrived were supposed to shower and go back out, I refused to go back down. Saved me money I guess but I told myself not to fall asleep, I was figuring out how can I get back down and escape and convince my husband how we could just forget the $ 348 we spent through
to David Roger’s Royal Hawaiian Realty in room 3204. I woke up around 5am to the building moving, trade winds blowing strong enough to create sounds of sirens and just glad the dawn was coming so maybe I could really get us to go to another hotel and throw all that money away. Well had to end up enduring it and so each time we came back we stayed in with not a chance to use that terrifying elevator more than we had to. The last day I even got the security guard’s phone number and emailed Mariah Dailey who is the manager for the sister building Equus on Sunday, she has since not replied to how frequent the elevator gets stuck and what people do in that instance if they’re inside because it’s not like someone can just open the elevator up and walk out, it’s OUTSIDE!!! It was okay for me inside if you really ignore the water damage in the bathroom and the peep looking hole above the toilet. I was reading all the reviews while inside the Waikiki Marina. The thing about Airbnb is they make it seem like it’s someone’s residence so since you don’t know 1700 Ala Moana is the same place as the Waikiki Marina because they don’t tell you the address till you book. You also don’t know about all the awful reviews on
or
I say that’s pretty misleading. Had I known that I would have booked directly through
the $ 95 for 3 nights and paid $ 20 parking a night which would still have been less and I get credit for each stay with
Aside from feeling like this guy trusted us by giving us the lockbox combo, etc to the room, I feel taken. Air BNB should take places like this off their site. IT WAS TOO Pricey for a room you feel stuck in.

First of all, I booked this place through
. There was no disclosure that this place is in fact a bunch of poorly-​maintained hotel rooms from Equus. This is a blatant abuse of the website. I am filing a complaint as we speak. But that is a story for another day.
After we parked our car, we went 32 floors up the world’s scariest elevator. The elevator is *outside* the tower! (This must have been a fad back in the day, because several buildings have the elevator outside.) Hawaii is notorious for extreme tradewinds, and you can feel the elevator sway with every gust. (In fact, I could feel the whole building move at times.) With the elevator being outside, there is no escape if the elevator gets stuck. (Scary thought.)
Once we opened the door to the room, my jaw dropped. The room looked like it hadn’t been updated since the Nixon administration. The basic layout of the room is bizarre – most notable feature is a large recess under the panoramic window, which is an inaccessible waste of space. Also, the windows slide open *completely* so that you could (theoretically) go out onto the unsecured ledge. Probably not an issue for most, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable with children staying in the room.
Any of this could be forgiven if the room were in decent shape, but, alas, the room looked like it belonged in post-​war Kosovo. Even the basics weren’t done right– there was no base board on any of the walls, and the carpet wasn’t tacked down. There is a stand-​alone shower (no tub) that has no shower door. All there is is a poorly-​fitting curtain that spans the space where the door should be. As a result, there is an area along the sides of the curtain that allows water to escape, which it will, since it is right where the water hits your body. The most disturbing damage was a hole in the ceiling *directly* above the toilet! (Peephole, or plumbing leak – I don’t want to sit on it!)
Oddly, the room included some amenities that most hotels in the area don’t: a good-​sized refrigerator, a microwave, a stove-​top, free wifi, and some beach gear. As nice as this was, I cannot get past the state of disrepair that the room was in. Cleanliness is king in a hotel room. If the room isn’t clean and well-​maintained, I do not care what else it has to offer.

The Hotel sucks the key is to rent a condo from an owner and ask if the condo has been remodeled before renting. We’ve stayed here short and longer term and this place is perfect location and easy access to everything. Look on airbnb for listings

This place is part of the Equus hotel. With cockroaches, wet carpet, and geckos, it deserves negative stars.
I was super excited about getting to Hawaii and staying in a hotel with a king sized bed and a full ocean view. After staying in small hotel rooms in Japan, we were finally splurging on something more luxurious! Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to the hype.
The first room they checked us into had a king sized bed, and a wet spot on the carpet. The full ocean view was also obscured by other hotels. Since we were paying so much money, we thought we would see about getting transferred to another room, since the wet spot was a little unsightly. When we complained to the guy at the front desk, he revealed to us that we were not staying in a full ocean view room, but in a partial ocean view room. He offered to make it up to us by putting us in a room with two twin beds and a full ocean view available that evening (no thanks), or in a room with a queen sized bed and and a full ocean view available the next day. We opted for the queen bed room, and they told us we had to pack up all of our things the next morning and move out of our current room, but we wouldn’t get to move into our new room until it was fully cleaned and the guest staying there had already moved out.
This was a huge inconvenience, but we went with it, because we were planning to be out all day anyway. When we came back in the evening and checked into our new room, we were thrilled for about thirty seconds until we saw cockroaches scuttling up the walls. That’s right, we traded wet carpet for cockroaches. At this point, we were tired of complaining, and didn’t want to keep packing our stuff up and moving, so we just dealt with it. We later saw a gecko dart into the cupboards as well. For the remaining three nights of our stay, we spent the first ten minutes upon returning to our room killing cockroaches. One day, we let the housekeeper in to tidy the room. We had left a cockroach corpse on the wall, and it was still there by the time we came back. The worst was when I had already gotten into bed and Josh K. had discovered a cockroach on the wall right next to the bed. We were both up and in combat mode until it was found and killed (it was hiding under the bed skirt).
The day before we checked out, Josh decided to give the front desk a piece of his mind, and the guy we talked to assured us that there was nothing he could do, and that we would have to wait until the next morning to talk to the manager. When we complained about roaches, he didn’t acknowledge them at all, or apologize for them (even though it’s apparently a very popular complaint). When we met the manager the next morning, she did the same thing, and refused to acknowledge their existence. She offered money back for putting us in the cheaper room for the first night, but wouldn’t offer us more until Josh pressed on and on about the roaches. We still haven’t gotten back the money we were promised.
I was okay with staying here despite it being old, and a little run down. Had I known that there were cockroaches, and that the management was completely apathetic about the roach situation, I would have run the other way. The property is not properly maintained, and the management betrays this when they refuse to acknowledge that the building is infested with roaches. They aren’t trying to fix it. They are going to get as much money as they can before the building crumbles or people stop coming here. Don’t give them your money.

Both my colleague and I had the same experience when booking this hotel: Saw tons of great reviews, booked, then when it got closer, suddenly encountered hundreds of terrible reviews.
Believe the terrible ones!
Our first clue should have been when our cab driver from the airport had never heard of it. Our second clue should have been when we had to check in at a DIFFERENT hotel (you check in at the Equus). And our third clue should have been the confusion over whether or not people actually can/​do live here year round. Then we should have known.
We knew when we got to the «suite» we had booked– and it was just a single, bizarrely shaped room with a baffling crawlspace beneath the window. We knew when the air conditioner could not control temperature at all and was so loud that we couldn’t hear each other speak over it. We knew when the light in the shower sounded like a swarm of bees was dying inside it.
It’s weird– you recognize all the things from the photos you’ve seen, but everything is just slightly off enough that you know you’re in for trouble. And the bad reviews are all accurate: the elevators break all the time (at least three times during our weeklong stay), there are little fruit flies everywhere, the parking is expensive. There are some redeeming factors: the hot tub is really nice, the pool is heated comfortably. The location is hell of convenient to the Convention Center.
It got the job done. But it’s the kind of place we’ll be recalling with some incredulity for years to come!

This is the worst place I have ever stayed. It has water shutdowns frequently, elevators are usually broken and they’re are bugs everywhere. Everything is always broken in this building. It’s no wonder cab drivers don’t know this building very well, no one wants to stay there

OK, I used 1800hotels. c*m (Mistake!) to pay for 4 nights at the Ilikai but my money ended up at this hotel. (Not this hotel’s fault and I’ll work it out with the crappy booking site eventually.) (Just a later note: 1800hotels is refunding my whole payment for sending my money to the wrong hotel. I am satisfied with the response. Again, this was no fault of the hotel being reviewed.) I’m saying this to let you know I may have a negative feeling going in!
Interesting reading that one of the 2 elevators did not work in 2008. It still doesn’t ! Very slow with only 1 elevator serving over 30 stories! You just have to relax and not be in a hurry. (Though who wants to spend any vacation time standing in a tiny hallway waiting for an elevator. Claustrophobia!)
Hotel is shaped like an arrowhead. The fire exit chart in the halls showed 2 rectangular units and 2 triangular per floor. I was in a triangle on the 16^th floor. Nice view of marina across st. No street noise. Decent sized room but a little hard to appreciate with the odd floor plan.
I asked at desk (desk is in Aqua hotel on street in front of this tower — friendly clerks and you get a wire for internet for free — just return it to desk when you leave.) and each unit is privately owned. That makes it hard to be sure what you are getting. In my case, I felt the room was too worn especially in the kitchenette area. I just used the refrig but has 2 burners and sink plus microwave. A few plates, couple of glasses and 2 – 3 forks. VERY basic. No soap to clean the dishes — you often do get some dish soap at places like this.
Good king bed, comfortable armchair, writing desk with chair, 2-​top round table to eat on. Window air conditioner which worked fine. About the smallest closet I have ever seen. Shower was very hard to keep at a comfortable temp, no bathtub.
I wasn’t really into the layout. Granted I was bummed about not being in my giant beautiful room at the Ilikai (stayed there yr before) but the bed being so close to the kitchenette just made me feel like I was in a sad little room at the end of my life.
HOWEVER, I was paying only $ 80 a night. If I wasn’t such a spoiled baby this place would have been ok at that price in a lively part of Waikiki by a big park, with ocean view and by tons of restaurants and right near the Ala Moana Mall. Get it at a low price and don’t expect much and you’ll do ok. Me, I ate my pre-​payment and checked out after 2 nights when the Ilikai had a room available.

we used to stay here a lot and then all of a sudden the service got really bad. The elevators are really slow and in the mornings you have to share them with the maids. Don’t expect the maids to make room for you either. They look at you and then push the close button. The front desk closes at 4:00 so don’t bother trying to get anything from them after that.
On our last trip, we didn’t have towels. We called the front desk and they said it would be up by 3. We fell asleep and when we woke up it was 4:15 and that’s how we found out there is no one at the front desk. It was horrid. After that experience we have never been back and probably never will.

I found this to be a great place to stay for the Marathon. About ¼ mile from Ala Moana Shopping Center, it was an easy walk to the expo (race pickup), food court (for quick meal) and about ½ mile from starting line.
The first room I had was on the 32^nd floor, but the window was left open and it was soaking wet because of all the rain. So, they gave me another room on the 35^th floor that looked towards the shopping centter.
Have to say it was a pain to have only one elevator working most of my stay, and the laundry room was a bit non-​functional as well. The rooms were nice (I had a kitchenette, which was great to shop and cook my meals).