Wait'Ll We Tell the Folks Back Home

By NANCY GIBBS

Times must be tough for jaded travelers. There are not many places left on this earth that still confer bragging rights now that Katmandu has as many package tours as Atlantic City and darkest Africa is bright with flashbulbs. So just in time comes the spanking-new Hyatt Regency Waikoloa on the lee shore of the Big Island of Hawaii. At $360 million, it is the most expensive resort ever built. But that's not, even nearly, all.

Guests at the oceanside Hyatt are festooned with exotic flowers and offered colorful concoctions before they reach the check-in desk of the half-indoor, half-outdoor lobby. (What would you do with those lovely rugs after a driving rain? Replace them, replies the managing director, smug as a puffin.) To reach their rooms, guests can board a bullet-nosed monorail tram or take a boat along the canal that runs the mile-long stretch of the resort. Crispy captains in white shorts and knee socks pretend to steer, clanging the ship's bell, but the boat is actually guided by wheels running along a 19-in. groove underwater. "Disneyland changed the way people view entertainment," muses Amy Katoh, who is visiting Hawaii from Tokyo with her husband Yuichi. "And this place will change the way people think about resorts."

That is exactly what Hyatt had in mind. Hawaii, the sunshine's circus, attracts more American vacationers in winter than any other destination, and this hotel is fast becoming a main event. For their many millions, Hyatt transformed a stark moonscape of black lava rock with not so much as a sprig of vegetation into a 62-acre tropical garden, ringed by three towers, 1,241 rooms, seven restaurants, 75,000 sq. ft. of convention space, a 17,500-sq.-ft. health spa, 1,640 transplanted coconut-palm trees at $1,000 apiece and water everywhere else. The design is the work of Christopher Hemmeter, a sort of revolutionary in the resort business. His tastes run toward the liquid: private lagoons full of sociable fish, waterfalls, whirlpools, water slides and vast, curvaceous pools. Distinction lies in myriad details, like the seven bird keepers who ensure that the 27 pink flamingos get enough carotene in their diet so that they don't fade to beige.

But other resorts offer tropical splendors and offbeat birds. The Hyatt hunch is that today's travelers are in desperate search of an Experience, a made-to-order memory, and are willing to pay $265 a night for the average room to $2,500 for a presidential suite in order to find it. From that belief was born their Fantasy Resort, which promises to change the way many superluxe hotels do business. After much campfire brainstorming, the Waikoloa staff came up with a menu of activities, priced them fantastically and still cannot always keep up with demand. Though roughly half the guests at any given time are there on business, they still seem willing to spend whatever free time and discretionary income they have on making their trip memorable. "There's an ego boost in going home saying 'We took a helicopter to a remote spot and had a picnic just for two,' " observes Patrick Cowell, a regional vice president of Hyatt Resorts Hawaii and the hotel's managing director. "Can't you imagine that kind of story in the Des Moines bridge circle?"

Guests can choose a hunting safari for wild boar, goats or pheasant on the slopes of Mauna Kea ($550 for the first person, $200 each for the next three). The game will be dressed and served for dinner that night, or shipped home upon request. Or deep-sea fishing on a luxury yacht ($1,380 for up to six people), Formula Ford race-car driving (not available until April), a day in the saddle with the paniolos (Hawaiian cowboys) of the vast Kahua Ranch ($1,460 for four) or dinner at the Hulihee Palace, former home of the Hawaiian royalty ($1,995 for four). Visitors can also watch whales or sunsets or moonrises from the deck of the 50-ft. catamaran Noa Noa, with its two amiable skippers and well-stocked bar.

Some of the most spectacular scenery on the largely undeveloped 4,038-sq.- mi. island -- the gizzards of an active volcano, for instance, or thousand- foot cliffs of the Kohala coast -- is virtually inaccessible to all but island birds and their kin, which includes the Bell JetRanger III helicopter. For a mere $1,380, the copter will take four people on a tour, complete with a champagne picnic on windswept Lauhala Point and a view right into the maw of the active volcano Kilauea. This jaunt is not for the faint of heart or weak of knee. When the tree line below suddenly drops away, leaving the swaying copter to swoop deep into an amphitheater of waterfalls, even the rush of peaceable New Age music injected through the passenger headphones may fail to tranquilize a white-knuckle flyer.

Perhaps the most popular fantasy of all involves a visit with the resort's most distinguished guests: eight Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins, in residence under the care of marine-mammal veterinarians Rae Stone and Jay Sweeney. Rather than ricocheting around a concrete pool, the dolphins frolic in a protected saltwater lagoon. "Everything about this place is fake, except for the dolphins," observes a guest wryly, as she wanders by. The Dolphin Quest program offers a model environment for research and study, as well as a unique aquatic encounter for the guests. "These animals can humble anyone," says trainer Christian Harris. "Guests may arrive at the dock complaining about something or other, but they get in the water with the dolphins and are smiling in about ten seconds."

At $55 for half an hour, the dolphin encounter strikes many guests as a bargain -- enough, at least, to ensure that there is usually a waiting list for a spot on the dock. Reservations at the restaurants are also hard to come by when the hotel is full, but the relentlessly eager staff has invented a solution: Vacations by Design. Upon arrival, guests check off all the activities and restaurants they want to try, and the Aloha Services staff will make all the reservations and print up a schedule. "And you know what?" says manager Cowell. "This will be happening in most resort hotels in the future. It's going to end up being a standard service."

If this kind of resort really is the wave of the future, other hotel chains may be hard pressed to ride it. The landscaping alone at the Hyatt Regency Waikoloa cost $4.5 million, and to run smoothly the hotel needs nearly two staff members for each guest. But Hyatt is convinced that it has found a gold mine. Over the next five years, the company plans to develop 25 more luxury resorts worth a total of $3 billion. Developer Hemmeter himself has ten more megaresorts in the works. "We're now planning hotels that go way beyond this one," he says. Which can only mean setting up shop on the lee shore of the moon.