I was the coordinator for my sister's wedding. She was married on Shipwreck Beach, just outside of the Hyatt grounds, and had her wedding dinner at Tidepools Restaurant. When we first started looking at sites, the Hyatt was her dream location..., but the prices on their website were way out of her budget. I decided to call and see if the prices were negotiable at all, and found that instead of booking a "reception," we could make reservations for a large group at one of their restaurants. When I looked at Tidepools special group menu, the lowest price was $65 a person. But I found that they were willing to adjust and remove some of the items offered on the menu to create a slightly lower priced menu package for us.
We had 21 total in our party, and they accomodated us extraordinarily well. Tidepools is a gorgeous restaurant, perfect for a wedding reception, and they sat our party next to the giant Hyatt waterfall. They let us drop off our favors ahead of time, and they were all set out at each place setting when we arrived. We ordered a beautiful "special occasion" cake for only $72 to feed our group. The pastry chef made it in the wedding colors, and it was a beautiful, large, round, one tiered cake. If you're willing to pay more, you can get a made to order tiered wedding cake. We were happy with this option though. The staff was wonderful and brought out vases so that we could set all of the bouquets on the table, served us for the toast, and brought out a special knife for the cake cutting. The service was impeccable. We got the wonderful experience of a Grand Hyatt Kauai wedding reception at a very reasonable cost.
There were a couple of drawbacks doing it this way:
1) The Hyatt will not let an offsite professional photographer come on site if you do not pay their wedding site fee, which is thousands of dollars. This was ok though for us. We knew it ahead of time, got all of the wedding photos with our photographer out on the beach, and for the reception dinner at Tidepools we just took our own photos.
2) We weren't in a private room. They told us ahead of time that we "probably" would have our own room if the restaurant wasn't too full that night, but that even if we weren't in our own room it was ok to do our toast and cake cutting . As it turned out, Tidepools was busy that night, and there were a couple of small tables of people near us. We were warned that might happen, so it didn't bother us, but I did feel a little sorry for the people who were sat next to such a large group and hoped they didn't mind too much.
All in all, the staff and food at Tidepools was fabulous, and the cake was lovely.
And we learned it is possible to have a reasonably priced wedding reception at the Grand Hyatt Kauai.