$3b

This way to the lobby at the Four Seasons. Below, ground zero for the recent struggles

Rockpoint Group, bowed out in 2014, Rob Walton of the Walmart Stores family bought a minority stake. The most prominent homeowners include Citadel founder Ken Griffin, Starbucks Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz, brokerage pioneer Charles Schwab, KKR’S George Roberts, Oaktree Capital Management co-founder Bruce Karsh, Godaddy founder Bob Parsons, Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle, and Warren Buffett’s sister Bertie. (Each of their places was purchased for or is currently appraised at $17 million to $23 million.) But no one who frequents Hualalai upstages the location. The shore has a shallow shelf stretching out almost a half-mile, making a friendly swim with a team of dolphins an almost daily possibility. And while some resorts to the north are caught in a wind tunnel between two volcanoes, Hualalai is in a calmer pocket. It’s like the clouds part for the place.

It was here, in the middle of all that, that one sunny day about five years ago a senior executive at a company you would definitely recognize wandered with his wife over to the Palm Grove Tranquility Pool—the one with a bar in the middle you can paddle up to—and saw that all the chaises longues were occupied on the pool deck. Then he walked a few feet to the beach and saw that the chairs there were taken, too. This man had been coming to Hualalai for years, first renting homes, then buying a fourbedroom house. He had done everything possible to be in a situation where the answer to every question would be yes. He had plunked down a $200,000 initiation fee and $ 40,000 a year in dues to join the Hualalai Resort Club. His three children had practically grown up at Hualalai, made friends there, and came back whenever they could. They

loved the familial aloha spirit everyone talked about. Now, he was being told no.

As his wife started to cast about for a patch of grass on which to set up camp, the executive’s mind flooded. This was Hualalai, not South Beach. This wasn’t supposed to happen in paradise.

He pulled out his phone, took a picture, and texted it to the management. They apologized right away. They were all too familiar with the problem.

Les Firestein is a Hollywood screenwriter who had brought his family to Hualalai as hotel guests for years. “It’s extravagant, but they deliver,” he says. “You know you’re going to have a perfect time.” Last summer a friend who owned a home there offered him free use of his place for a week. Firestein said yes. Then he quickly learned that if he wanted to do anything at the resort beyond hanging out at his friend’s house, he had to pay daily “unaccompanied guest” fees—$150 for adults and $75 each for his two children. The fee gave Firestein pause, but only briefly. “Right off the top, we’re paying $450 a day,” he says. “But then again, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s the Four Seasons. We’ll suck it up.’ ”

Firestein then learned that even after paying the fee, his family wasn’t entitled to the same access as hotel guests. “It was like there were two systems of privilege operating at the same time,” he says. He wasn’t permitted to reserve a table at any of the restaurants between 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. He had to show a guest ID card everywhere—“like, ‘Show me your papers,’ ” he says, still annoyed.

It was poolside that he particularly felt the caste system at work. “You’d go to a pool and order what you want,” he says. “And then, when you make the mistake of sitting in the wrong seat, a Hualalai