What Price Plunge?

Anyone who knows me well knows how much I love luxury resorts. Everything about them. Apart from enjoying all they have to offer, I have an absolute fascination with the way they are run, managed and maintained. Reaching for the pinnacle of luxury is no mean feat. A top brand that is firing on all cylinders needs to purr like a smooth engine continuously as time goes on and as public tastes alternate, the hotel landscape shifting with more and more competition.

As more and more people travel, the luxury sector has grown in leaps and bounds. Prices have too, often increasing without the resultant increase of any internal offerings or improvements. They just jump up, year in, year out.

This brings me to one of the key components of many luxury hotels. As people need to de-stress from their manic, digitally addicted existence, a vast many seek respite in a tropical locale, somewhere to slow right down with all the elements of a perfect stay at their fingertips. One of these elements is coveted by luxury travelers more than any other.

Luxury resorts are clever in the way they categorise their suites, or I should say, Villas. Several categories are available, each one inching their way up to the best of the bunch, the one with the best view, possibly sunrise or sunset, and there, as you fling open the doors to your expansive outdoor terrace, is the shining star, beckoning you with its bluest of water surrounded by lush vegetation, with that view and expansive blue sky above – the plunge pool.

I believe the plunge pool is perhaps the greatest asset to top luxury resorts. Everyone loves the privacy they entail, the luxe factor they present. Having that pool means spending more time in your villa, not having to share a main pool with all those other guests. The riffraff. The wannabees. You feel like you’ve hit the jackpot when you have a plunge pool. Let’s think about this though, often a plunge pool is only big enough for just that – to plunge in. To bob up and down. Ah, what joy! One or two strokes across and you’ve reached the other side. Heaven!

Like everything though, things get bigger. For many years now, the best luxury resorts have incorporated actual pools into their top category villas. Here you can do laps. This is now the most common top category addition. These are infinity pools, where your eye is even with the skyline. Just you and miles of blue, the most soothing colour of all. These are the most coveted, designer slick pools of all.

I guarantee that guests who choose not to spend the extra money and choose a villa category below, spend most of their time thinking about what it would be like to have that pool. What a different day it would be, lolling in the pool, cocktail alongside, in full sun, rather than sitting on the tiles in a chair in the shade, or worse still, indoors. Thank goodness there’s still a view!

It’s the price of a pool villa that is interesting to examine. Often these are several hundred dollars per day more than the very same size villa, sans pool. Here the question needs to be asked, is this extra expense for the occasional dip worth the extra expense? That is all in the eye of the beholder. The answer for most would probably be yes. A private pool for the type of holiday break I have mentioned above, to unwind and turn the world off a little, is priceless. It certainly affords another level of relaxation and thus, a different time away than you would have if you hadn’t chosen the pool option.

Then there is the stress when you choose not to take the Pool Villa and the anger that slowly eats away at you, looking at all those other guests, all relaxed and ultra-tanned, who you haven’t seen all holiday. You just KNOW they have the Pool Villas!

Didn’t you come to the resort to de-stress?

I must admit that even I, when I have a Pool Villa, spend much of my stay finding out which Villa is better than my one. Which has the bigger, better positioned pool? 10 degrees more to the right, that gives you another hour of sunshine? Which has more privacy? I even ask the staff which ones that feel are the best. I often look in as many of the empty villas as possible. The staff will always show you the ones better than yours. Then you will come back! Often, it takes a few stays to really nail that very best villa of all!

For those who don’t take the Pool Villa option, it will remain in their thoughts. I guess they’ll just have to come back again and stay in one after all. Many do. So, they spend the money anyway. A lot more, by choosing to return. Gearing deeply into the human psyche, these luxury resorts certainly are clever.