JVPLAY and our team of International Architects and Water Park Designers & Suppliers are leading the way throughout the world building Indoor Water Park Resorts.
During 2007, thirty-three (33) new hotel indoor water parks opened. Eighty-three (83) hotel water parks are under construction now or will break ground during 2008 — including fifty-five (55) projects scheduled to open in 2008 and another twenty-three (23) that are slated to open in 2009-2010.
Hotels and resorts with indoor water parks are a small but rapidly-growing segment of the lodging, recreation and entertainment business. Nationally, water park hotel rooms grew 20.9% in 2007 compared to ordinary hotel rooms at 1.4% growth. The following chart illustrates the growth over the last six years.
Nationally, these 169 properties have a total of 28,888 rooms, over 4.1 million square feet of indoor waterpark space and 511 meeting rooms covering 1.6 million square feet of meeting space. Today, about 48% of hotel waterparks are affiliated with a national franchise brand and 52% are independent.
Hotel water parks are popular with families and hotel owners because they fill empty rooms at higher room rates than hotels without indoor water parks.
Every year the construction pipeline gets bigger. And hotel water park projects keep getting bigger in size. Many are part of mixed-use resort destination developments that include conference centers, recreation, entertainment.
*** images courtesy of Kalahari Resort with thanks.
An indoor water park is like an outdoor water park, except all the fun is packed into a cube which is attached to a hotel that is open 365 days a year, rain or shine. The first hotel indoor water park in the USA was created in 1994 a businessman who was trying to fill his hotel rooms on weekends. He installed some water gizmo in his indoor pool, and weekend occupancy skyrocketed.
Hotels and resorts have ups and downs. They are seasonal properties with high periods and low periods from month to month and from weekday to weekends. The indoor water park has an amazing ability to fill empty rooms with families and young children on weekends all year long and whenever kids are out of school.
The indoor water park is a perfect component for the hotel owner that wants a balanced mix of customers — individual business travelers, groups and individual leisure guests.