New global authority on ‘true beachfront’ hotels
*Thanks to The Beachfront Club Team for sharing this information
The Beachfront Club will protect the unwary from misleading advertising, and find them hotels directly on the beach where they want to be – with just a few clicks of the mouse.
Ever booked a ‘beachfront’ hotel, only to find yourself crossing roads and dodging traffic to get from your hotel to the beach? Countless thousands have, and many of them were angered or felt cheated by the hotels’ misleading advertising that put them there.
A simple, hi-tech solution is available. With a few clicks on this new website, The Beachfront Club, anyone can quickly discover if a hotel or resort, or even small guesthouse, is absolutely beachfront or not – on any beach in the world.
The Beachfront Club has meticulously mapped every true beachfront hotel along the beaches of the entire planet. And while they don’t claim to have them all yet, they already have over 8,000 displayed in amazingly detailed maps that leave no doubt about the absolute beachfront locations of ‘qualified’ hotels’.
What is a ‘true beachfront’ hotel? To qualify for this hi-tech, new-style hotel club a hotel must have no road or motorised traffic whatsoever between its rooms and the sea.
The Beachfront Club maps display qualified hotels individually, by their borders, showing the shape, size and position of each – far more credible than the standard dots used in most websites. Opening the satellite image displays the hotel outlines over their exact geographic locations in detail never seen before. No doubts remain about these hotels’ absolute beachfront locations. This allows the user to completely bypass hotels near, but not right on the beach, regardless of what their advertising suggests.
Throwing sand in the face of tradition that dictates membership in most hotel clubs, The Beachfront Club creates bed-fellows of backpacker bungalows and glitzy 5-star resorts, something quite unprecedented in the status-conscious hotel industry. Location is the only criteria here.
Some 500 hotels had already signed in during the pre-launch period, says The Club. Those included many of the top names in the world; Hyatt, Marriott, Sheraton, Westin, Intercontinental, Renaissance, Le Meridien, Barcelo, Radisson and others. Seeing such prestigious and up-market names sign into a hotel club alongside their small budget neighbours shows just how eager hotels are to use the credibility and marketing power of the new, true beachfront qualifications this club provides.
Four clicks through region, country and destination on either maps or name lists lands users on the core feature, the beach maps displaying those beachfront hotels in unprecedented detail. The site is in its first beta release, with the founders recognising that in a project of such grand scale there will be many mistakes, and they call on beach-lovers everywhere to help locate hotels they have missed, and to correct any mistakes.
The Club promises many new features in the coming months that will introduce more user participation on many levels. These include restaurant members, ratings and reviews of both hotels and beaches, user-generated, ‘wiki-style’ destination and beach information, plus photos and community elements.
Thailand, one of the world’s top beach destinations with an amazing array of beachfront accommodations in more than 1,000 establishments, has been used as The Club’s showcase and launch point. Even small establishments on the remotest islands have been mapped meticulously.
Hundreds of small bungalows on little-known Thai islands costing US$30 a night can be found just as quickly as the large, beautiful resorts on Phuket or Koh Samui. In the Caribbean and Egypt the site similarly maps all of the huge, fancy resorts in fence-line detail. In Africa users can check out all of the ‘true beachfront’ resorts from Zanzibar to Cape Town. In Dubai pick one of the mere 15 beachfront hotels among the hundreds there. The Mediterranean suffers from the many roads along its beaches, disqualifying many hotels. Spain, Greece and Turkey together, however, provide The Med with a strong ‘true beachfront’ profile with over 1,000 hotels and resorts qualifying.
Perhaps most valuable of all for beach-lovers is what The Beachfront Club does not show; it cuts out all of those hotels across roads and through the traffic. Thus users can hunt for an absolute beachfront hotel with no fear of being duped by the misleading advertising of the many hotels that pretend to be beachfront when they aren’t, without danger of sleeping to the roar of traffic instead of the lullaby of waves.
