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I Worked at a Resort Like White Lotus. Here Are Nine Secrets Only Staff Know

From influencers flipping golf carts for content to guests demanding refunds over rain, at Turtle Bay Hawaii, not every visitor to paradise is an angel.

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Brandon Presser

March 15, 2023 at 4:15 AM PDT

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In 1959, Hawaii became a state—just in time for the advent of mainstream commercial flying. Almost immediately, travel agents began to wallpaper their offices in tiki-themed posters, promising Polynesian breezes and peachy pink sand. And where did their clients go in droves? The original monolith to pleasure in paradise: Del Webb’s Kuilima Resort Hotel & Country Club, now known as Turtle Bay Resort.

To call Turtle Bay an icon would be an understatement—more than 150 movies and TV shows have been filmed on its 1,300 acres, including Lost, Pirates of the Caribbean, NCIS, The Hunger Games and cult comedy favorite Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Additionally, the hotel’s beaches boast one of the world’s best surf schools, the Jamie O’Brien Surf Experience. According to some accounts, the thumb-and-pinky shaka wave was invented in the area in the early 1900s when it was nothing but a sugar mill, by an employee waving in transport trains who was missing his middle three fingers.

Today the honeymoon and celeb haven is fresh off its 50th anniversary and an ambitious $250 million renovation, cementing its reputation as Oahu’s ultimate getaway. It was the perfect time for me to sneak through its hallowed gates to understand how the property’s elite team manages the volcanic demands from its thousands of guests, all wanting their own specific version of island idyll.

Donning my bright blue aloha button-down, I spent a week working among the resort’s stewards, as the staff are called, keeping the peace between puritans and porn stars at the beach, fending off stealth buffet moochers and combing the golf course’s sand traps for any wayward partygoers left over from the night before. I also heard some epic tales of misbehaviors from yesteryear. (Some sources are quoted anonymously to protect their relationships with guests.)

Turns out, not everyone in paradise is an angel.

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“Have you ever seen White Lotus?” jokes Steven Harris, a manager at the surf school. He says Turtle Bay is “the same thing, but without the murders.” He’s not wrong. Other stewards confirm it, too, although the show itself was filmed at the Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea.

There are teenagers throwing tantrums in the lobby when parents ask them to put down their phone, as well as “guests taking Zoom calls with multiple computers set up in the lounge like they’re super important: ‘Look at me, I’m doing work, I get to travel and write it off of my taxes and ruin everyone else’s holiday!’ ”

And then there are the honeymooners already showing signs of marital trouble. “Sometimes the front desk feels like a psychologist’s office,” notes Sacha Wilkins, a guest service supervisor who’s been a caring ear for weepy, regretful newlyweds.

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Remember Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya McQuoid overdosing on the breakfast spread? That’s real, too. Servers estimate that guests whose reservations include all-you-can-eat access at the Ocean Club Lounge consume 5,000 to 6,000 calories a day—and that’s before the macadamia nuts. Some guests aren’t prudish about nabbing bits for later: The boldest buffet ninjas will walk in with their own Tupperware or walk out with entire trays of eggs Benedict.

Sex workers, as in Season 2 of the show, have been known to make appearances as well, even at breakfast. “They are always fun,” says another steward. One repeat visitor is “a high-class call girl from Waikiki, always with a different 65-year-old guy who is out here on business—maybe married or maybe not. In the morning she comes down in her full-blown [evening] costume. She’s here enough that you’d think she’d wear something more discreet.”

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How do you know if a couple is on a honeymoon? They tell you. “They’re like parrots,” jokes activity coordinator Alohilani Drummondo, “saying ‘it’s my honeymoon’ to anyone who will listen.”

That doesn’t make them special. “In 10 check-ins, three or four are honeymoons, three or four are birthdays, around two are anniversaries, and one is a babymoon,” says Wilkins. They all want a room upgrade, and 1 in 5 will try to haggle on the price of an oceanfront bungalow. Instead, many of them get personalized welcome amenities, like green juices or charcuterie boards, along with handwritten notes from Maryam Zakeri, Turtle Bay’s VIP manager. On a single shift, I delivered 25 of them—all to guests celebrating an anniversary.

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Honeymooners tend to be gracious and relaxed ... until it rains. When that happens, staff set up games and Wii consoles in interior spaces and turn the ballroom into a movie theater. But it doesn’t stop some from going nuclear.

The most dramatic rain-related complaint on record, remembers resort manager Joey Woofter, was when a couple demanded that Turtle Bay shell out for their stay at a nearby resort with reportedly less cloud cover (not true—it was raining everywhere). Another couple wanted a full refund, plus a five-night credit for a honeymoon redo.

“At least 20 people complain about the weather each day,” notes Drummondo. “It’s too hot, too cold, too cloudy, or the waves are too big—and around half of those guests want something free as compensation.”

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Everyone Gets Super Superstitious

Remember the Hawaii episode of The Brady Bunch, when Bobby takes a cursed tiki idol and things go terribly wrong? Well, apparently for many Turtle Bay guests, the hex is real. It’s called Pele’s Curse.

“I receive packages all the time from guests returning stones, sand and shells,” says Sarah Sundby, the resort’s purchasing manager. The repentant patrons usually include a detailed apology spelling out the bad luck that’s followed them home. (One two-pager I saw read like the Book of Job, with fits of illness and a real-life dark cloud that wouldn’t go away.) Those parcels get routed to Sundby’s office, where I was staggered to see a mountain of lava rocks and bits of coral, all waiting to be dumped back onto the shore.

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That wasn’t my only encounter with the supernatural. Ghost stories are commonplace across the archipelago, and Turtle Bay is no exception; the resort is set on crown land (formerly owned by the Hawaiian royal family), including several protected burial grounds.

One landscaper says she’s seen three ghosts, including the spirit of a young woman who hovers near the golf course: “I say aloha to her every day on my morning runs,” she says. A Hollywood cameraman who’s a frequent guest always requests Room 624—he believes it to be inhabited by a benevolent otherworldly presence.

The Beach Is for Wildlife—and Wild Guests

Turtle Bay maintains a 650-acre conservation area for nesting albatross and monk seals, the size of Waikiki’s entire hotel zone. But its beaches, like all of Hawaii’s shores, are considered public land. That makes them a unique backdrop for culture clashes that require the security team’s intervention.

Complaints are often made by guests creeped out by one Speedo-clad regular who lays out a menagerie of stuffed animals around his beach towel. But more often trouble brews when, say, a gal from Orange County, California, bearing only a strand of dental floss, sets up shop next to a Mormon patriarch from Utah. (They’re both common demographics here.)

Further grievances inevitably roll in when European guests sunbathe topless—technically not against the rules. According to the fine print, Hawaiian law requires only reproductive organs to be covered, but topless tanners usually cover up if asked.

Security is also called to the beach for real wildlife sightings. “We work with marine conservation agencies to check if our monk seals are birthing,” says resort manager Woofter, whose team can then cordon off the area to keep tourists away. A recent urgent call had one security officer running down to a patch of sand right next to the hotel block, rope in hand, ready to protect a pregnant-seeming seal that had been spotted and called in. Reader, it was a nude sunbather.

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Five Hundred Pool Towels Are Stolen Each Month

And that’s a lowball estimate, wagers Toni Cano, one of the senior members of Turtle Bay Resort’s housekeeping team. Unbeknownst to guests, there are tiny tracking chips woven into the seams of hotel linens. They’re intended to trace clean and dirty inventory as it moves through certain thresholds on the property—but also to make it easy to figure out how many items have been removed from the grounds.

At $9 a towel, plus $3 in shipping per unit, Cano spends well over $72,000 on replacement beach towels a year. (Guests never pay for missing stock, but back when the towels bore the name of the resort in large print, the replacements got billed to the sales team. “They made for great advertising!” Cano argues.)

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Satin hangers have started to go fast, too. “I bought 5,400 in February,” Cano says, “and I’m already being asked to buy more.” Ditto silverware, which gets replenished at a rate of 40 se-ts per month. “It’s always the teaspoons and the forks, never the knives,” says Sundby, with a sigh of relief. Altogether the resort spends an estimated $150,000 a year simply on restocking stolen goods.

The Golf Course Gets Reckless

“Golf has surged in popularity because of the pandemic,” says Travis Joerger, director of golf. “It’s no longer an old-man sport.” To wit: Before Covid-19, women made up only 1 in 10 golfers at the resort, and now that’s up to around 3 in 10. The demographic is much younger as well, with a slew of 25- to 35-year-olds on the course. Maybe that explains the recent uptick in X-rated gameplay. “You’re out in the middle of nowhere, so people think they can get away with a lot,” Joerger says.

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Wedding groups are a major red flag for the cadre of golf pros; many try to stuff their club bags full of alcohol and take their bachelor parties to the greens. For one group, all the female caddies were actually go-go dancers, and they performed out on the fairway, the grounds crew reports. Couples have been caught skinny-dipping and taking care of business in the course bathrooms, or in the sand traps in the wee hours of the morning.

The worst guests? The wannabe influencers. They’re so desperate to create video content that goes viral that they set up contrived situations to flip their golf carts, forgetting that the buggies have state-of-the-art GPS technology that tracks their movement and pauses, signaling exactly when and where a vehicle gets toppled. “A guy will drive super fast and turn and jump out to spin the car,” says Joerger. “And they don’t tag us [on Instagram], but we see our logo on the cart and it’s a small island, so we know exactly who they are and can send them a bill to fix it.”

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Housekeepers Catch Some Crazy Things, Too

At Turtle Bay, each of the 408 rooms counts as a single “credit” for housekeepers, who are responsible for 15 credits per eight-hour shift; the 42 oceanfront bungalows count double. As the newest housekeeper, I was responsible for the same amount. Subtract a morning meeting and lunch break, and that’s an average of 30 minutes per room—including a full disinfecting of bathrooms and cleaning sand from sliding-door tracks with a paintbrush, as well as a daily “special focus” project, such as scrubbing grout or spot-checking carpets.

And you know those accent pillows that adorn the bed when you check in that you inevitably chuck on the floor? Those are only removed for cleaning every 45 to 120 days unless there’s visible wear and tear. Same goes for comforters. Mattresses are turned or flipped every two months.

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More is needed for the dirtiest of guests. Cano estimates that the staff finds vomit in about 20% of rooms and that full ragers happen roughly once a month, leaving trash everywhere and “cupcakes that have been smashed into the carpet.” In one record-setting instance, a drunk guest apparently lost total control of his bowels; every last square foot of carpeting and upholstery had to be replaced.

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For all this, housekeeping tips usually run around $5 per room per night—$5 more than I earned per room during my shift as a bellman carting luggage around. (Typical, I was told!) And there aren’t any finders-keepers bonuses, either. The hotel maintains a lost-and-found system, so items can be sent back to guests; it’s mostly made up of teddy bears, which tend to go on field trips with the bed linens to an off-site laundry facility. Leftover beer or liquor gets dumped. Individually wrapped snacks get chucked, too, following one incident in which the “whole staff got accidentally high” on beautifully decorated cookies—party favors from a gender reveal party, they innocently thought.

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At the concierge desk, I was relieved that most people had straightforward transport or restaurant reservation requests—though there were definitely outliers. I actually sympathized with the guest who brought a decibel meter and demanded to measure the noise of the air conditioner in several rooms before picking one. Sleep is important! But I couldn’t wrap my head around the requests of those who insisted on being picked up for dinner on horseback, or the couple who requested a baby monitor so they could go off-property without hiring a babysitter for their 6-month-old.

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Sometimes phone requests can be even weirder than face-to-face ones. “We once had a guy call the concierge with his GPS coordinates [in the middle of nowhere] and ask if someone could come bring him a mai tai,” says front office manager Madeline Pilch. “We didn’t even know if he was staying at the hotel.” The request was not fulfilled.

Even stranger was the recent A-list entertainer who booked an 11-night stay and then never showed up. Apparently it’s the celebrity version of snagging two different restaurant reservations for the same night—and not an uncommon practice. In this case the backup plan cost more than $40,000.

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Surfing Can Be a Contact Sport

“Surfing is a big priority for many of our staff,” says Woofter, who balances timetables to give his stewards the opportunity to catch a wave before or after their shifts. (One of my fellow bellmen, for instance, has won multiple world surfing championships.)

For pupils at the on-site surf school, the sport’s appeal is, ahem, not always about athletics. Take the script detailed to me by my fellow instructors—a flirting pas de deux—when a woman arrives for her lesson with her male instructor. She calls: “Look at how ugly my bikini is on me,” and he responds: “No way, you’re totally hotter than my ex-girlfriend.”

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“It happens every time,” notes one of the surf pros, who drops the “ex” in his response if he’s not feeling flirty that day. As third-party operators, the instructors have more leeway to engage with their students—taking visitors out on off-hours snorkeling trips or hitting the bar—though they’ll never initiate extracurricular contact.

“It definitely happens that women give us their room number,” says another surf pro. Those offers, he says, are usually declined out of professional courtesy. But every instructor I spoke with seemed to know someone else who’d caught that break at least once.

The staff estimates that around 90% of surf students talk a big game about surfing back at home—but the waves on Oahu are far more powerful than the ones along the mainland. “It can be a really humbling experience,” says general manager Jason Hdez. “We’ve had people fly in all of their equipment and then not even be able to paddle out [far enough].”

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