If you are looking for the latest chic experience, Holmes Sweet Home is not for you. If you are looking for a comfortable home away from home, where your hosts who treat you like family, this bed and breakfast is where you want to spend a night, or two, or six, as we did. As the sign read, "you come as our guests but leave as our friends". That is exactly what we experienced. Charlotte and John would join us after breakfast each day. We would share our Hilo experiences and chat about anything that came to mind. These are two of the nicest persons I have ever met. The location is perfect with Volcano National Park, the Hilo Botanical Gardens and Mauna Kea all within comfortable driving distance. Mike and Sally Harris

We stayed for 4 nights at this charming place. John and Charlotte are perfect hosts and we feel to stay at friends. The house in a dead end road has an wonderful view towards Hilo downtown and the room is comfortable and overall clean. We enjoyed the wonderful breakfast with fresh baked muffins and also the talks with Charlotte and John very much. It was a perfect base for our exiting days in the area of Hilo, in the volcano park, on Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea and at the waterfalls as well. If possible we will come again and recommend this B&B to everyone who want to experience perfect hospitality.

Aloha is reality

Peter & Katharina

I don't usually gush about places I've stayed at but I really must say we loved staying with John and Charlotte for 3 days at Holmes Sweet Home in Hilo. They were such kind, caring hosts and really did make us feel like we were staying with family. We slept in the Blue Ginger suite, which suited all our needs and was very clean. The bathroom was huge! We could use the microwave just outside the room and breakfast was freshly baked goods and fruit salad as well as chatting with the hosts - they really took interest in our travels and plans. Beautiful colourful flowers outside in the courtyard, too! We could mark our home country with a pin on a huge world map in the breakfast room where there were already 100+ pins from all over the world. The breakfast room with the microwave is also usable during the evening and we had some of our meals there. The room price was more than reasonable - around $90 as I recall, which was the best value by far of any of our Hawaii lodgings.

The location is great for Hilo - in a better part of town (residential neighbourhood) at a slight elevation, which made it fresher at night. It was a good point of access for our Mauna Kea adventure and if you wanted you could also drive to Volcanoes national park or the east coast.

Our flight got rescheduled to late in the evening when we were leaving and Charlotte & John kindly allowed us to use our room until later in the afternoon because there wasn't a booking on the day after us - that was so nice after a day of sightseeing and a 20hr flight ahead! Couldn't have had a better end to our trip - thank you so much Charlotte and John for your hospitality!!!

The wife and I recently stayed here for four nights. Our Hosts (John and Charlotte) were fantastic. I'd feel extremely comfortable recommending this B&B to any of my family or closest friends as a 'gem of a place' to stay.

You can trust the reviews that everyone else has contributed to this B&B!!!!!

If the opportunity ever presented itself again we'd return here in a heartbeat.