Skyline Hawaii Haleakala Sunrise Tour

Kevin's Activity Tips:

In February of 2017 Haleakala National Park implemented a reservation system for sunrise viewing from the summit of the crater. Without advanced reservations, visitors are not permitted to drive rental cars into the National Park from 3am to 7am. If you want to see a sunrise from the top of Haleakala and you didn't secure a permit weeks before your Maui arrival, one of these tours is your only way to get inside the park in the pre-dawn hours.

Sunrise on Haleakala has gotten SO popular that it is hard to find space on any of these tours if you aren't planning ahead. There isn't a tremendous difference between the three tour operators who have permits to run Haleakala Sunrise tours. Your decision on which company to go with may come down to taking whichever company still has space available for your date. Of the three companies, Valley Isle Excursions will likely get you to the summit the earliest which is good if you want to do some stargazing while the sky is really dark. They include a really nice hot breakfast at the end of the tour, but the restaurant they go to (called the Mill House) is located all the way down at the bottom of the mountain. We do like the Kula Lodge breakfast location better because of its great views ... it is still high on the slopes of Haleakala and that's the place that Skyline Hawaii stop for breakfast. Polynesian Adventures USED to do breakfast at Kula Lodge, but recently switched to the Mill House where Valley Isle goes as well. While this restaurant doesn't offer the views that Kula Lodge has, it IS a very NICE restaurant and if you wanted to dine there for dinner you'd need reservations WEEKS in advance!

The one big advantage of Skyline Hawaii is that they have no child rate for this tour. That means that there are less children on the tour with this company than with the other two. If you DON'T have children, you will likely find less of them on this tour with Skyline Hawaii. We also like their breakfast location better than the one offered by Valley Isle Excurwsions. Oh, also, if you don't have winterish clothes with you in Hawaii, Skyline provides jackets if you need one! One potential downside ... Skyline Hawaii offers resort pickup in West Maui and in South Maui, but they don't offer both pickups on the same day. The pickup route for each tour is based upon the location of the first reservation that they've gotten for that date. If you reserve this tour and you are staying on the West Side and the date is already scheduled for South Side pickups, you would have to drive to the Central Maui Park-n-Ride to meet up with the tour in the middle of the night. When we run into this situation we always contact clients and check if this option is acceptible to them, and if not we try to move you to a different date or switch to a different company.

The road to the summit of Haleakala is not as narrow as the road to Hana, but there are hairpin turns … LOTS of them. And driving it in the middle of the night in the dark can be a challenge. Actually, if you aren't properly rested, driving can be dangerous. Consider one of these tours … you can rest your eyes on the way up instead of having to prop them open with toothpicks and getting white knuckles from holding the steering wheel too tightly.

Haleakala is famous for its spectacular sunrises and it has a well-deserved reputation. We wish every morning at the summit could be equally beautiful, but obviously this just isn't possible. There is no way to predict which mornings are going to be pretty based upon weather forecasts. Occasionally there are days when cancellation is necessary due to a serious storm, but ordinary summit weather is notoriously unpredictable and changes quickly. The tour operators provide the same level of service every day, and incur the same expenses in operating the tour regardless of the quality of the sunrise view on any given day. All they can do is take people on their tours every day and watch what happens as the sun rises.