Mākena Golf & Beach Club: What It Is and Where the Public Access Is

Why your search results are confusing

If you're looking for a hotel in Mākena, this is the reason the results don't add up. The Maui Prince Hotel opened in August 1986 with 310 rooms, became the Makena Beach & Golf Resort, and closed on 1 July 2016. Demolition began in June 2018 and took months. Booking pages and reviews for it are still floating around.

What replaced it is a private residential community by Discovery Land Company, built for the landowner ATC Makena Holdings. A boutique hotel was in an earlier version of the plan and was dropped in a 2017 permit amendment. There is no hotel at Mākena now.

What this means for the beach

More than you'd expect, because the club maintains the best facilities on this coast. The comfort stations and showers at Maluaka, and Mākena Landing Park itself, are maintained by Mākena Golf & Beach Club rather than by the county.

The beach is public regardless. Hawaiʻi's Chapter 115 establishes a right of transit along the shoreline, and DLNR's coastal lands office treats the beach transit corridor seaward of the shoreline as public property, with obstruction of access a petty misdemeanor.

The distinction worth holding onto: the beach is public by statute, while the parking and the restrooms rest on a signed right-of-way, a Parks Agreement and a private maintenance commitment. Those are different kinds of guarantee, and only one of them is in a statute.

The golf course, and which course closed when

You cannot play here. The course is members-only, and there is no resort rate because there is no resort. If a booking site offers you a Mākena tee time, it is selling something that stopped existing.

The two-course history gets reported backwards often enough to be worth stating carefully. Robert Trent Jones II designed both an 18-hole North Course and an 18-hole South Course for the old resort. The South Course, the stronger of the two, closed in 2008 and has stayed closed. The North Course closed on 31 March 2013 for a redesign by Dennis Wise and reopened as the private members' course that operates today. So the course that closed permanently is not the course that went private.

The South Course has not been rebuilt. It appears in a draft state environmental review for the Mākena Mauka project as a course proposed for renovation, and a proposal in a pending review is not a reopening date. On the reopening year for the North Course, the club's own site says the renovation completed in 2014 and The Maui News reported 2015. We have not been able to reconcile those, and we would rather tell you that than pick one.