Making a Splash: Will Your Next Vacation Be Underwater?

Billie Cohen

Underwater hotels are all the rage — you can sleep in submarine suites, dine among the fishes, drink the night away underwater, and soon maybe even play tennis below the surface. And now there’s another entry in the underwater tourism scene, the Planet Ocean Underwater Hotel.

The idea has been cooking for a while now; in October 2013, the Key West News announced local businessman Tony Webb’s design for a 12-unit hotel and research center to be situated off the coast of Florida. At that time, to help raise money, Webb was pre-booking rooms at $1,500 a night. He filed a patent application in March of that year, and by June of 2014 they were seeking investors on crowd-funding site IndieGoGo. Then another milestone: This past August, the patent was approved and the team is finally hoping to start construction. Now this week, the hotel is back in the news because of its environmental component; from the outset, Webb explained that one of his goals was to find a way to give back to the oceans by helping to restore coral reefs. His commitment to that issue has made the hotel part of the conversation as the COP21 Sustainable Innovation Forum is about to kick off in Paris.

Related: Amazing underwater caves where you can swim and scuba dive

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From the Planet Ocean website, it looks like Webb & Co. are targeting existing resorts as potential clients, offering them single pods for $3 million each (complete with underwater elevator, and safety and preservation management services) or a 12-suite complex for $20 million. The pods will be constructed out of steel and acrylic and resemble space ships (which is fitting, since Webb talks about this part of the travel industry as “inner space tourism”). Interestingly, the pods remind us of another underwater hotel idea that was floating around a while back, the Poseidon Undersea Resorts. In 2007, the New York Times wrote about the Poseidon, which at that time was going to be constructed in Portland, Oregon, and then submerged off of Fiji. The anticipated opening date was 2009, but the project stalled and has yet to be realized.

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In the meantime, vacationers who want the underwater experience have this new opportunity to look forward to, along with these others:

•Sleep in a private floating suite with an underwater bedroom at the Manta Resort, Pemba Island, Zanzibar Archipelago.

•Dine in the glass-enclosed Ithaa Undersea Restaurant, 16 feet below sea level, at the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island Resort.

•Party the night away at the Subsix club at Per Aquum Niyama, Maldives.

•Wake up to marine life outside your window in an underwater suite at Atlantis, The Palm, Dubai.

•Scuba dive over to the Jules’ Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, Florida, a repurposed research lab from the 1970s.

•An underwater tennis complex has been proposed in Dubai. The seven court structure would be topped with coral reefs, to make the whole thing look like a natural atoll.

Ready to dive in?

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