Four years out of a classroom, sixty-three years old, and eleven trips booked in the past eight months. The order in which I check things has changed since the days when I queued at a travel agent on the high street and accepted whatever printed itinerary came back. It goes pool, then rate, then route, because a stunning signature swimming pool is the one amenity that cannot be fixed after you arrive. A bad room can be moved. A closed pool cannot.
First: what the water actually is, and when it shuts
Ninety seconds is what it takes to establish whether the pool is a signature feature or a photograph taken in 2019. I check the length first. Anything under 18 metres is a plunge tank with a bar beside it, and I have swum in enough of those to know that eight strokes gets you from end to end and then you turn, and turn, and turn. Then the hours, because a rooftop pool closing at 6pm in August in Seville is a piece of scenery, not a swimming pool, and the hotel will still put the 6pm closure in eleven-point type on the booking page. Then the depth, since 1.2 metres throughout rules out anything but standing, and I want to know before I pay $340 a night in Dubai, not after.
Nothing gets booked off a website photograph:
- Open dates, as in which weeks the pool is drained for maintenance, usually late January in the northern hemisphere
- Whether it is heated, and to what temperature, since “heated” in a Greek October can mean 22°C
- Access, because a pool shared with a beach club selling day passes at €45 a head is not the same pool at 11am
That last point cost me a week in Cyprus in 2023. The pool was 25 metres, genuinely lovely, and full of cruise passengers from 10am until 5pm.
Second: the rate, once the water has passed
Only after the pool clears do I look at money, because the price of a signature pool is usually hidden in a resort fee, a spa minimum or a minimum-nights rule that triples the weekend rate. A Las Vegas Monday in mid-October came in at $118 a night at a property with a 30-metre pool and no resort fee. The same room on the Saturday was $389 plus a $45 daily charge. That is the difference between swimming and subsidising somebody’s cabana. For that trip I searched cheap flights las vegas on a Wednesday, flying out on a Monday, and the fare was $212 return from Seattle, roughly the same as the three nights of resort fees I avoided by shifting the dates by five days. Long-haul pool hotels are a different animal: for Bali in February I book about five months out, and for a Greek island in June three weeks is usually enough.
Third: whether the pool is worth the flight at all
Here is where I part company with most of what gets written about hotel pools. If your only reason for flying is the water, the train wins. A pool hotel in the Austrian Alps, 90 minutes by rail from Munich for €29, beats a two-hour flight, a €60 bag fee and an hour at each airport, and I would say so to anyone who asked. Flying earns its place when the pool sits somewhere the railway cannot reach. In practice that means the Canary Islands in January, Dubai in March, or a desert property outside Tucson where the water is 28°C at seven in the morning and the air is 19°C.
One question decides the booking. Is the pool reserved for guests? Once that answer is yes, everything else can be worked around.
