spotcoolstuff      travel

You are planning your honeymoon, or a trip celebrating some other special occasion, and you are looking for a hotel room that is as special as the reason for your travels. You want to find a resort with accommodations that cause you to gasp WOW, that will make you say to yourself “I’ve never stayed in a room this nice before. I might never stay at a room this nice again.”

In the Caribbean, the room you are looking for is at the Jade Mountain Resort.

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“Affordable” and “Caribbean” are not necessarily contradictions in terms.

To find cool hotels, relaxing beach resorts and luxurious bed and breakfasts in the Caribbean at an affordable price try these tips:

Look at the smaller establishments. They don’t get the press the big resorts do, but they sometimes provide much better value. A good Caribbean guidebook can be an invaluable friend in finding the high value hotel gems.

Check out the less developed areas. In Jamaica, for example, there are lots of great, inexpensive hotel and resort options outside of the major Negril, Ocho Rios and Montego Bay tourist centers.

Decide what’s most important to you and try to find a hotel without a lot of frills you won’t use. If you don’t care about using a spa, for example, you can save money by staying in a resort without one.

Shop around. A superb website for finding great deals on resorts, as well as on cruises and vacation packages, is Cheap Caribbean.
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And, most of all, read on. The resorts below are among Spot Cool Stuff’s favorite affordable Caribbean digs. Each has rooms in the high season for less—and in some cases much less—than $150 a night . . .

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For those seeking a Caribbean experience that’s exclusive, private, nature-filled and Asian-tinged look no further than Aman’s Amanyara Resort in the Turks and Caicos.

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We’re not sure what the antithesis of a freewheeling Caribbean beach experience would be, but a faux European castle has to come close. Yet, somehow, those two opposites successfully come together in the unlikely Blue Cave Castle Resort.

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Visit the site of the Whitepod ski resort in the Swiss Alps between April and November and what you’ll see of it is . . . nothing.

You’ll see no roads. No electrical wires. No place to stay. Just a 19th century farmhouse and a pristine alpine meadow that’s just begging for some von Trapp kids to twirl around in it Sound Of Music style. The views of the snow peaks from this place 1,700 meters (5,600 feet) above the oceans might be the grandest untouched mountain vista in Europe. “Untouched” being the key word.

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There are only two rules at the Soneva Gili resort in the Maldives and, trust us, after a few minutes here you won’t mind following either: 1) No shoes allowed and 2) No news of the outside world. This is a place to escape, unwind and relax. And what a place it is! Peaceful, quiet and stunningly beautiful. There’s scuba diving and snorkeling, yoga and tai chi classes, and massage stations on the beach. Not to mention some of the world’s more scenically placed bathtubs.

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Staying at the Hotel Everland feels like spending the night in a 1970s shagadelic bachelor pad.

There aren’t many hotels that could be as well traveled around Europe as it’s guests. Then again there’s no hotel like the one-room Everland. This pre-fab capsule, designed by a pair of Swiss artists who cryptically go by L/B (Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann), was built to be mobile. After stints at Expo.02 and on the Shores of Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland, and then on the deck of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig, Germany, the Hotel Everland now sits atop the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. At its current location this hotel might have the best Eiffel Tower view of any in the city.

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You know a swimming pool is big when an average swimmer is unable to complete a single lap within it. And when he’s likely to be passed by a sailboat while trying. That’s the situation at the San Alfonso del Mar Resort in Algarrobo, Chile. The pool there — the world’s largest according to the Guinness World Records — took five years and nearly $4 billion to build. (That’s not a typo, that’s billion with a “b”). The pool is a full kilometer (.62 miles) long, 35 meters (115 feet) at its deepest point and covers more than 20 acres. The massive amounts of water required to fill the pool comes from the Pacific just beyond the pool’s edge. A high-tech filtration system cleans ocean water, cycles it through the pool and then returns it to the Pacific in an environmentally friendly way.
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