During the winter months, sunseekers flock to Hawaii for the beach. A good swimming beach, however, is hardly a pre-requisite for a hotel location. On the Big Island, in particular, where swimming beaches are few and far between, many resorts sit astride strands of land that have no wonderful beach to boast. It can be a little hard to figure this out from hotel Websites. Witness the Hilton Waikoloa Village and the Four Seasons Hualalai. The Hilton has a tiny pocket beach with no swimming possibilities – in fact, you can’t even see the ocean from the pool due to a fairly high berm surrounding a chunk of the resort. There is a narrow, artificial beach next to the artificial swimming lagoon constructed within the berm. The Four Seasons, likewise, has what seems to be an artificial beach. It is on the ocean shore but the waters are rough, the bottom rocky -- it's definitely not proper for dips. To their credit, if you ask the hotels themselves about swimming at beaches on their property, they readily fess you can’t swim there. So know before you go that, if you really like to swim in the ocean, you’ll likely be driving to the beach if you stay at these hotels.

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Image via Flickr/Amishah

—Alex, 12/14/06