Just returned from Kauai, Maui and B.I. We stayed at upscale lodgings on all islands, including a couple 5 stars. I will tell you we saw roaches in our room at 3 of the four places we stayed. We even had saw two live roaches (large waterbugs) in our room at one location. Surprisingly complaints to management illicit little response. I don't want to name where we stayed because I'm not trashing the places, it just seems that large roaches are a fact of life. I will say that after encountering the first live roach and having to use "deep woods off" to kill it,(It did work) I carried a can of raid with me. I was really paranoid about carrying roaches in my luggage so I sprayed the exterior of my bags with raid.

People may call me paranoid, but I really just didn't want to find an unpleasant surprise. Plus it is awful to find roaches in your room in the middle of the night and have nothing to kill them with! You see their antenna peaking but you have no way of getting to them! YIKES.

Trust me the can of raid is nice.

If you rent a car - don't be suprised if you have lots of little bugs. We did. We didn't alert the rental agency until after we were home. We should of the first day. It would of made the drive in the car much better.

jc: Your warning about bugs and renting a car brought a laugh about our cockroach story when visiting Kauii a number of years ago. My husband and I were on our honeymoon and Kawaii was our 5th island to visit. Since we had been spending more than our budget, we decided to rent a car from one of those "rent a dent" places. We drove to our hotel, checked in, stayed in the room awhile (it was our honeymoon after all) and then went out to the car to explore the island. The car had been closed up, very warm, and when we started to get in, we saw hundreds (but it seemed more like zillions!) of cockroaches scurrying all over the place. We got some kind of a bug bomb and let two of them off and the next day used the car, but I never sat back into the seat and was looking around the whole time! Not very comfortable!!

We got back from Maui and Oahu a week ago and we only saw one huge roach in our condo the first night in Maui. It was so big that I saw it before I turned the light on in the bathroom. lol. If we had seen more than one, I would have complained to the management.

Oh, come on, Tracy, tell us the names of the hotels. People with this problem frequently do on the "hotel review" cite of this website!!

The bugs in Hawaii are fricking huge, and tend to have an aggressive character. They have antenna that you could use as a toothpick.

You can hear them at night, while you are trying to go to sleep, crunching noises in the rafters above you. You can hear them scamper under your bed. Keep an eye on your food, because if you are not careful, they might very well walk away with a cookie or your leftover fish. Human toenails are a delicacy to them, and they prefer nibbling them off of the foot rather than scavenge for clippings. They also like to hang out on sleeping people's faces, right under your nose, to bathe in the warm moist air that is exhaled. They are wonderful little friends once you get used to them, kind of like free pets.

To tell the truth I'm more worried about the brown tree snakes or whatever those things are that have entered HA from Guam. What islands are they on? It's bad enough having geckos. They always make me jump about a yard in the air. Do you suppose those noises at night which I attributed to geckos were actually cockroaches?

Where the hell are you people staying, in tents? I didn't see ONE nasty bug when I was in Hawaii, and please learn the difference: a cockroach is brown, a palmetto bug is a polite name for cockroach, and a waterbug is something else entirely.

Ah, that explains why I woke up to the terrible sensation of a beetle trying to spoon with me last time I was in Maui...

"spoon with me" ?????????

We may have run across the last living human being to use 'spoon' in a sentence. No wonder he's the gas king - that colon must be at least 104 years old.

I read in Maui Revealed that those are cockroaches in Maui. We stayed at The Kaanapali Ali on the 9th floor.

Sue, what's the password so we can all read too?

B-b-b-but please, I want to know about the brown tree snakes.

The few times I have been to Hawaii I don't remember bugs being an issue.

For those of people with a can of RAID by their side - remember RAID is a poison and is probably far more harmful than a little bug (and no matter how big they are they are still smaller than me!)

Hmmmm, I notice nobody is talking about the tree snakes.

So...what about the tree snakes?

There are no tree snakes in Hawaii..yet. The military and airlines are doing their best to keep the snakes from hitchhiking in on planes from Guam though.

I was told when I inquired about a place at the Volcano, that cockroaches aren't a problem on Hilo near the volcano because of the Altitude! Anyone ever hear of that? They can live thru nuclear wars and in our freezers but not at high altitudes? Any bug experts out there?

I stayed at Carsons Volcano Cottage and was told by the owners about the altitude. We had a room there with windows open and no screens. We inquired about bugs. They were right. We did not see any bugs.