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Feb 20, 2018 | 12:13 am

#8

francophile

Join Date: Dec 2001

Location: SFO

Programs: AA 3 MM, IHG Diamond

Posts: 4,589

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2...ionaire-fight/

Excerpt:
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 brownshirt basically comes over and says, ‘You can’t sit there.’ And there was literally no one else near the pool because it was kind of drizzling. It was just bizarre.”

Firestein writes dialogue for a living. Standing by the empty chaises longues, he didn’t hold back. “I said to them, ‘You know, this is weirdly like Jim Crow. You’re telling us we can eat here and not here, and there’s no one else around?’ ”

He didn’t stay the full week. Another family the Firesteins had rendezvoused with there—visitors, he notes pointedly, from South Africa—also left early. “I don’t want to exaggerate,” Firestein says, “but it really is an apartheid experience.”

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