This Kauai-Based Vacation Rental Company Offers Luxury Homes — and Works With Travel Advisors

Twenty-one years ago, Phil Jones moved to Kauai with the intention of opening a luxury destination spa that, in addition to featuring traditional treatments and yoga, would also feature adventure-oriented activities and fitness training workouts.

In searching for the perfect spot for his spa — at the time, he envisioned a boutique hotel as its host — he stumbled into an entirely different business venture: luxury home rentals for high-end tourists visiting the Garden Isle.

And Pure Kauai was born.

We sat down with Jones to hear about what’s new with the company — including its expansion to the Island of Hawaii — what clients can expect when booking a Pure Kauai vacation rental, and how the company can work with travel advisors who are looking for an agent-friendly vacation rental option in Hawaii.

How many homes do you have, and what sets them apart from other vacation rentals in Hawaii?

We have roughly 30-40 homes in our inventory. We might add some here or there, or get rid of one here or there, but that’s really our sweet spot. We also just added two homes on the Big Island of Hawaii [just north of Hilo], but we try not to go out [beyond Kauai] too much. 

Our homes are mostly between Hanalei and Kilauea, which is only about a 12-mile stretch. So, they’re all in a very short corridor of the North Shore of Kauai and that, in my opinion, is the nicest part of Hawaii. But we don’t go outside of that zone much, because we can’t service [the homes] to the level that we can in that zone.
All the homes are privately owned, and we have an exclusive arrangement to rent them from the homeowners, and each has a property manager to maintain the level of quality that we expect in a home. Properties are expected to have beach chairs, towels, umbrellas … everything that the clients need for the basics.

But each of these homes can be wildly different. There's an arts-and-crafts home. There's a very ultra-modern home. There's a $60 million colonial estate. And whenever the homes aren’t being used, we are constantly working on them, and they’re being updated. You have to try to run a good ship from A to Z. Our guests might say, ‘Hey, I’ve rented 10 houses from you. I expect this next house to be of the same quality that the other homes have been.’ So, we try to, even in our least expensive homes, have a level of service that is really solid.

There’s a huge demand for private vacation rentals, but it’s rare to see rental services provide amenities beyond what a hotel can provide. What are some of the amenities Pure Kauai offers to clients?

A lot of the services are offered in the home, whether it’s [private] chefs, a teacher or a personal trainer. But our greatest sell is our island. Kauai is so beautiful, and there’s so much to do, that we really encourage people to go explore. So, we can really offer anything that's available on Kauai. Immediately after clients book a house, we provide these super customized itineraries with photographs and links. We also assign them a concierge who is kind of their assistant. 

The concierge sends [clients] an email [after they’ve booked], and then has a phone conversation with them. Guests might say, ‘OK, I'd like food stocked, and here’s a list of foods we like.’ And if we can’t get that food on the island, we’ll have it shipped in. We try to customize the trip to whatever they want. This level of service is at a notch that nobody else is doing, particularly in Hawaii.

How does billing work for guests, especially if Pure Kauai is working with several third-party vendors (i.e., private chefs, yoga instructors, tour operators, housekeepers, etc.)? And are there any booking trends that you’re noticing?

We’ve really tried to up the level of service, even on the back end. It’s easy to book on the website. Clients will get a bill at the end of the stay, but they don't have to pay 12 different providers. We do it all for them right when they check out. So, we try to make the trip as seamless and effortless as possible, even if on the back end it has a lot of moving parts. 

Generally, the pricing of our homes is set between the homeowner and me. Right after COVID-19, we were [fully booked]. But since maybe August of last year, we’ve had a kind of a cooling-off period. But we’ve corrected our pricing to allow for that. Bookings are good for the rest of the year; we’re probably down 10-20% from last year, but last year was the best year we’d had, and it was an anomaly. 

How can travel advisors work with Pure Kauai?

As long as a travel advisor books the house for us, we give them a 10% commission. But generally, the travel advisor contacts us, we book the home, and then we either have our concierge contact the travel advisor to set up the trip or, if the travel advisor prefers, we can connect our concierge with the client. Really, it’s the travel advisor who is our client. But we also try to have the concierge and the family have a direct line of connection. 

I think the best thing about us, for a travel agent, is that we're in the business of making the travel advisor look good. Because if they were to book something that’s not with us, and that company booked them a lousy [excursion], or the check-in wasn't smooth or the house was horrible, they end up looking terrible. And the other big thing for the advisor is that once they send us that client, that client is their client forever. We make the travel agent’s job easy.

I think the best thing about us, for a travel agent, is that we're in the business of making the travel advisor look good.

Who is the ideal Pure Kauai client? Is it multigenerational families, or big groups? Who are you seeing walk through the door?

It's usually families. Multigenerational families, too, but usually it's just a family that doesn't want to stay in a hotel. They also want privacy, either because they’re well-known, or they just want to get away from people. 
They don't want to cook. They don't want to clean a house. They don’t want to wonder how to turn the stereo on, or the TV on. They want to have support, but they don't want to be around a lot of people.

Seventy to eighty percent of these clients are from Southern or Northern California. But we get New Yorkers, people from Colorado, people from Texas. The predominant visitor changes. In a booming real estate cycle, it might be real-estate developers. If Hollywood is doing well, it might be celebrities or musicians.