My husband and I just returned from a 2 week vacation to Hawaii with our 7 year old daughter that included the 7 day cruise aboard the Pride of America.
Pre-Cruise
Prior to the cruise we spend 4 nights at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Waikiki. This let us recover from our jet lag (after flying to Honolulu from Toronto, Canada) in a 1 bedroom suite. We loved the manager's reception with a live band and free drinks each evening, as well as the complementary breakfast buffet this morning. There is a large AAA (or CAA) discount that saved us over $200 on this visit and made the hotel more affordable. The hotel is located a short walk from the beach right in the middle of the action in Waikiki and we could walk to most of the sites we wanted to see.
We had cabin 8578, a mid-ship balcony. We chose this cabin to help reduce sea-sickness, and found that it was not very rocky, even when cruising fast on the open ocean. Also, the accessibility of fresh air from the balcony was very helpful with sea-sickness. This cabin gave us great views of the Napali coast during the sail-by, and also a nice view of the mountains when docked in Kaui. The cabin had a few maintenance issues, such as a broken door and a door lock that sticks - but these were minor problems that did not detract from our experience.