Lanai Travel Guide

The Millionaire's Just as Martha's Vineyard and Hilton Head serve the Eastern Seaboard as exclusive retreats, tiny Lanai is rapidly becoming a private retreat for West Coast dot.com millionaires, whose sleek corporate jets crowd the small airport.

Over the last decade, billionaire developer David Murdok has transformed the island from a sleepy pineapple plantation to a fashionable, trendy resort. Murdok recently bought all the stock of Castle & Cooke, the real estate company that owns virtually the whole island. The deal, ironically, increased Microsoft Corporation Chairman Bill Gates' net worth by $881 million since Gates, who got married on the island, owned just over one million shares of the company.

In addition to two new resort hotels and a host of resort amenities, Lanai is now a booming resort real estate market. One oceanfront lot, perched on the edge of sea cliffs with a view all the way across the channel to Maui, recently sold for $20 million. That's nearly 20 times what James Dole paid for the entire island in 1922. Back then, he bought the island's entire 16,000 acres for $1.1 million and established a pineapple plantation that dominated life on Lanai for some 70 years.

When foreign competition pushed Hawaii out of the pineapple business in the '90s, Murdok, who had become Dole's corporate heir, had the vision to realize that the island's future lay in tourism‹not tourism on the Waikiki model, but a private upscale retreat that would appeal to the sophisticated traveler who still wanted to get away from it all.

The simplicity of Old Hawaii still exists here. Lanai City is a town time forgot, with a tree-lined village square, general stores and tidy neighborhoods of plantation homes. It sits up on the rounded top of the island, 1,600 feet above the sea, cool and green.

The ridge lines of the island were planted with Norfolk pine. Now that the pines are tall, the island has a forested feel not present on the other islands. At the forest's edge sits one hotel, The Lodge at Koele, an anomalous inland Hawaii resort, with the air of a private hunting lodge.

On the island's best beach sits another luxury hotel, this one more of a conventional Hawaii resort, with plenty of sunbathing and ocean activities, but the two hotels are only five miles apart. In actuality, the whole island is one single resort. A guest at either hotel has privileges at both and a shuttle runs every half hour between the two.

What's there to do on Lanai? Plenty, it turns out. There is a wide range of resort activities- golf, tennis, horseback riding, clay shooting, swimming, diving, kayaking and a new spa. With all of this, to us, the best thing to do is explore. Walk, go by horseback, take a mountain bike or a Jeep and climb the ridge trails or wander out to a deserted beach, a really deserted beach. There are still less than 3,000 people on the island; with only 400 hotel rooms, believe us, some days you'll feel like that millionaire with the island to yourself.