I recently stayed at the Hyatt Centric Waikiki and Hyatt Regency Waikiki on another awesome trip to Oahu, my favorite island, and want to share my assessments, which may help you choose on your next trip if the pricing for both is similar, as it was for us. The purpose of our trip was primarily to requalify for Hyatt Globalist under their double elite night promotion, and we were fortunate to hang out with family and friends who were after the same goal. We stayed at Hyatt Centric for 4 nights and Hyatt Regency for 7 nights, both on the Healthcare Friends & Family rate (which does earn elite nights and points), and I applied my Amex Offers and Chase Offers to them.
Tag: Hawaii
Trip Suggestions: Oahu, Hawaii
Last updated: 2/26/2023
There are only a handful of places in the world that I love so much that I’d want to visit at least once a year. Hawaii is one of them. I lived in Honolulu for 4 months in 2010 and fell in love with it to the point where it has become one of my favorite destinations in the world, and I’m lucky it’s only a 5 hour flight away.
Oahu has a lot of haters, but I think those people either don’t appreciate amazing food or haven’t been to the right places. I can’t deny that part of Oahu has a lot of tourists and traffic, but I love that Oahu has the best of both worlds (city + nature). Just head over to Kailua, Yokohama, or North Shore and it feels like one of the less-populated islands with the beautiful unspoiled nature and wondrous hikes (did you know Oahu has more hikes than any other island?). Then come back to Honolulu and its amazing food and fun things to do! For those of you who thought you hated Oahu, I hope you will give it another chance after checking out this post.
Trip Suggestions: Big Island (Hawaii)
Aloha from the Big Island of Hawai’i, which is now easily my second favorite island (after Oahu)! I’m wrapping up a 7 night stay at the Marriott Waikoloa Resort, reviewed at the bottom of this post. But first, I wanted to share many hours of research for anyone who is planning their own trip to the Big Island. I found one particular website to be most helpful – Love Big Island. Definitely go to that site and browse like, every page. They keep it nicely updated and unbiased.
Researching PADI Courses
Aloha everyone! Ever since a quick free scuba intro in the pool at the Intercontinental Fiji, my husband and I have been wanting to get certified. We always liked snorkeling, but everyone we know that is a certified diver has nothing but amazing things to say about it, and just looking at their videos alone is convincing.
We probably could have had many opportunities to get certified in a beautiful place in our myriad of travels the past couple years – Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii multiple times, Bahamas, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Thailand, Vietnam…but we were hardly ever in one place for more than a few days (classic #travelhacker problem). Getting certified usually requires a minimum of 2-3 days, and you aren’t supposed to fly for 24 hours after diving.
Many blogs I read say that Thailand is one of the best places to get certified because it’s inexpensive and beautiful at the same time. I wasn’t able to fit it in to my recent 4 nights at the Park Hyatt Bangkok, so I thought about doing it on my upcoming trip to Vietnam in March. I did some extensive research on certification in Vietnam (Nha Trang is the most popular location for certification), and then decided to check what prices were like in Maui, since I will be there in January for a week, and we would have a car. To my surprise, doing it in Maui would maybe only be ~$100 more expensive than Vietnam (which I found to be around $350-450 including both the academic and water portions), which would be worth it since I wouldn’t have to take additional intra-Vietnam flights just to go to Nha Trang.
The FoundersCard concierge helped me with a lot of the research by calling a bunch of shops in Maui near the Andaz Maui in Wailea where I will be staying. I thought I’d share the results of our research here in case it would help anyone else! This is in no particular order and the prices are valid as of today’s writing (12/27/2017).
PADI Open-Water Courses Near Wailea
| Shop | In-person academic + water | E-learning academic + in-person water | Kama’aina Discount | Number of Days |
| Scuba Shack |
$375 + tax All-inclusive |
$179 to PADI $325 + tax |
No | 3 |
| Ed Robinson Diving Adventures |
$468.72 (incl tax) $60 for manual + shipping $18 log book |
$179 to PADI $364.57 (incl tax) $18 log book |
No | 2-3 |
| Maui Dive Shop | No option |
$179 to PADI $349.95 + tax |
10% off | 2-3 |
| B&B Scuba |
$419 + tax ($450 total) All-inclusive |
No option | No | 3 |
| NeverDry Divers |
$449 + tax All-inclusive |
$179 to PADI $349 + tax |
No | 3 |
| Maui Dreams Dive Co | No option |
$179 to PADI $349 + tax |
$100 off, requires full-time residence | 3 |
| ProDiver Maui |
$499 + tax All-inclusive |
$179 to PADI $379 + tax |
$100 off | 3 |
What about SSI?
After I did all this research, my co-blogger Michael Wu told me to look into SSI certification, which is what he got. I found a great blog post detailing the big-picture differences between PADI and SSI methodology (for example, the online portion of the course is free for SSI, whereas it is $179 for PADI). After reading the post, I was very intrigued by getting certification via SSI instead, so I tried to look into SSI certification in Maui.
My search results turned up only Maui Dive Shop, but when we called, they currently have no SSI instructors. I could do SSI in the Bay Area, but driving to Monterey from where I live is quite a trek in the early morning, it’s a lot more expensive and cold here, so I think I will continue down the path of getting PADI certified in Maui.
Next Steps
While I was researching, the advice I found over and over again in all the blogs was, it doesn’t matter whether you get PADI or SSI certified, it doesn’t matter where you get certified, nor how much it costs (in fact, there were a lot of quips along the lines of, “if you care about how much it costs, maybe you shouldn’t get certified at all.”)
The most important factor is who your instructor is.
So armed with all of this information, the next step is to thoroughly read the online reviews for each dive shop, and then make an appointment. I’m still trying to decide whether to do the e-Learning thing at home first, or just do an all-inclusive course in person.
If anyone has any advice or wants to add anything from their experiences, please feel free to in the comments!