What Maui actually costs

People say Maui is expensive. It is. But most of what makes it expensive is one decision, repeated: eating three meals a day out for a week.

Cook breakfast, make most lunches, and spend properly on dinner. That one change is most of the difference.

Two stops on the way from the airport

Costco, for water, snacks, breakfast, and sandwich supplies. It is the single highest leverage hour of the trip.

A Walmart pickup order, placed before you fly. It is sitting there waiting when you land instead of costing you an afternoon of your first day.

Breakfast at home

This is the easy one. You are on vacation, you are getting up slowly anyway, and breakfast out is the meal you are least likely to remember.

There is a Hawaiian Sun pancake mix we get every trip. Make that on the lanai and you have not lost anything.

Lunch mostly the same. Sandwiches from what you already bought, eaten wherever you happen to be.

Then spend on dinner

The point of saving on the first two meals is that you stop flinching at the third one.

Merriman's is the biggest splurge on the west side and it is worth doing once. Book it early.

Where the good cheap food is

Not everything worth eating here is a splurge.

Napili Market has genuinely good poke, and burgers made with Maui grass fed beef. Fish Market Maui does poke and fish tacos. Paia Fish Market is the stop on the way upcountry. The Honoapiilani food truck park is a real dinner for food truck money.

Tiffany's in Wailuku is my favorite first meal on the island, and for what it is, it is not a splurge.

Happy hour is the cheat code

Sea House does happy hour from two o'clock to four forty five, and the appetizers are the point. It is also one of my favorite views on the island, which you would otherwise be paying dinner prices to sit in front of.

Merriman's has started doing happy hour on the patio. Same view, considerably less money.

Reservations, and where not to bother

Make sunset dinner reservations wherever you can. That is the one thing that is genuinely hard to get and genuinely worth planning around.

Everything else you can mostly walk into.

And if the line at a famous breakfast place is long, do not stand in it. An hour of a short trip is worth more than any pancake.