Introduction
It is a universally acknowledged truth that the majority of the Earth’s surface is blanketed by oceans. Leaving aside the belief that over seventy percent of our world is covered by these immense bodies of water, we are beginning to re-evaluate how to use them due to our advance in human technology. As a rule, this statement concentrates on underwater hotels, as well as the potential and threats of maritime tourism. To begin with, this investigation presents essential data in the opening sentence, acquired from a recent exploration performed by Dr. Mavrodieva and SoAnswer.
With proper assistance, segments of the maritime domain – shoreline lines, lagoons, and islands – are rapidly expanding, making them suitable for ornate or vocational resorts and other investment possibilities. Secondly, the ocean house has a variety of interesting features that distinguish it from other conventional attractions. Thousands of amicable species are packed inside the ocean, according to scientists’ estimates. Meanwhile, an extraordinary, underrepresented layer of ocean life lies beneath the surface. The stunning appearance of ocean accents as well as increases to beauty, inventiveness, and the overall travel experience are widely recognized. Finally, reef retreat, a range of outdoor comorbid exercises, and a variety of visitor favors are available. These assumptions combine to shape the 400 of the over twenty-eight undersea retreats available today. The five greatest are stated.
The Rise of Underwater Hotels
Underwater hotels, especially in the form of submerged buildings, are becoming increasingly popular because they provide an unusual entertainment form. The history of underwater hotels is full of challenges and risks. Due to the many uncertain factors and the potential enormous investment risk, the development and construction of underwater hotels around the world are riddled with risks. Nevertheless, there were already more than 12 underwater hotels around the world by year 2019. The innovation and development of construction materials and technologies is significantly promoting the progress of underwater hotels. Therefore, since the year 2000, underwater hotels have developed rapidly around the world and have attracted the attention of governments, enterprises, and industry insiders from a tourism perspective.
Hotels near the equator, on islands, fjords, coves, bays, and other water areas, and occasionally in lakes, are all possible and usually have beautiful and natural resources, as well as natural environmental advantages. In this beautiful environment, people can not only relax and amuse themselves but also enjoy the unique underwater world. Such accommodation, which combines swimming, vacation, and sightseeing, is both a kind of tourism and accommodation, and it is also a comfortable holiday for people with good economic capabilities. The underwater hotel can also help them achieve this desire for an elegant lifestyle. Underwater hotels are a remarkable combination of building and design and human habitation. Whether it is a result of necessity, pleasure, obsession, or simply for fun, underwater development is indeed a fascinating exploration.
Historical Background
Over the past half-century, the hype for underwater and undersea constructions has inspired architects and engineers, though underwater hotels were initially explored as a solution to the problem of overpopulation. In 1968, architect Constantin Kopelev presented a “5-Star” underwater hotel in his drawing, intended for an area called the Beaufort Sea Dome. Seven years later, the U.S. Navy installed a submarine missile silo that was turned into an underwater hotel in the Bahamas. Christened as the “Nautilus”, it had a capacity for 24 people. Over time, new underwater hotels emerged in different parts of the world, including the Pacific waters of Belize.
In 1983, the first Underwater Society Anthology was published by Don and Lilian Brutzman. This volume predicted that the submarine tourism industry would be worth $US300-$400 million each year. Underwater hotels provide an adrenaline rush experience to a rare and niche segment of modern travelers. Sleeping 20 feet below sea level, at the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island, was the first undersea restaurant that later added 20 villa suites. In 2001, the Jules Undersea Lodge has become the world’s first underwater hotel, emerging in the underwater world out of a submerged research laboratory. In 2006, the Hydropolis Hotel (a 220-suite option) in Dubai, located at the border of the Emirate and the Arabian Gulf with a price of $500,000 per night to lease the Royal Suite, was set to open. Guests would be transported to the hotel and its ballrooms and clubs by a 75-passenger submarine.
Technological Advances
The advances recorded in recent years in the field of technology have made all these aspects of underwater hotels increasingly feasible. The development of functional materials as well as engineering innovation on site were essential paradigms that science and technology had to achieve. The O-tei underwater hotel summarizes these technological and futuristic advances.
One of the challenges facing the design and construction of buildings underwater is the resistance of concrete to the pressure that develops with depth. Building in deep water is very different from building underwater. It is not enough to use materials that can survive in marine conditions inside an envelope. The materials used for construction must be able to withstand the pressure developed with increasing depth. Architects Landmak identified these issues from the design to the construction stage. As a result, a cross section of the hotel was designed to accommodate four triangular concrete walls. This was accentuated with 12 metallic strips running along the concrete structure. These concrete and steel elements give the hotel the required weight to resist being dragged from the upper layers towards the base.
Alongside the Gensler Group and the IDEA Laboratory, they tested different formations and dimensions of concrete, and finally managed to design the ideal concrete-steel-concrete combination to ensure adequate weight for the underwater function of the hotel. The glass surface that ensures wide visibility is an anti-scratch glass. The underwater pressure would cause the surfaces of normal glass to deform and curve, altering the results of underwater transparency. Another imperative aspect is that the glass partitions had to be adaptable.
Additionally, for the entire project, O-tei had an aim of social interaction and recreational discovery. Correspondingly, three connected buildings were designed to host museums, exhibition spaces, retail stores, cafes, and an underwater hotel completely. The proposed design accentuates a distinct atmosphere for the hotel rooms providing tourists with different leisure prospects and individual experiences.
In yet another study, the “Five Star Water Hotel Resort” is conceptually acceptable. This Indian underwater hotel project, designed by Christoph Kumpusch and Ashe Trader, comprises an oxygen-rich environment and 20 underwater rooms. The futuristic look of the hotel is created by combining real nature with oversized structures and green spaces. A giant funnel in the outer waters introduces natural sea elements and, at the same time, a ramp is supplied for trade such as merchandise. The water acts to initiate a discovery for tourists and introduce them to the hotel. A single elevator takes tourists below the water surface where they will receive their room key from the lobby. For the underwater bedrooms, individual molding forms were combined with villa prototypes to maximize views around the corner. Communicate the unique feature.
O-tei’s first underwater hotel was the global network of comfort zones and won two prestigious awards. Municipal and regional decision-makers, experts, scientists, and executives from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland served as the jury for this competition on Nov. 14, 2019. The decor of the hotel was mainly modern interior design, but an “under-the-sea” theme prevailed. Each of the 42 underwater rooms has a bright, open and refreshing embrace, as well as a large window, to the underwater world full of fisheries, turtles and the entire gamut of marine life surrounding the ship. Each fully decorated room is equipped with air conditioning, a flat-screen TV, a private bathroom with free toiletries, clean towels and coconut-flavored shower gel, as well as a private patio. Just about anything you can think of, both above and below the sea, is provided by O-tei’s water-based activities, for a full resort holiday experience off the coast of Majuro.
Economic Benefits of Underwater Hotels
The economic development benefits of underwater hotels include several components. There are a number of people who feel that the actual or potential value of the tourism fees that underwater hotels may generate is much larger than the size of new generation spending. The tourism spending flows from and pools in underwater hotels, causing new consumption value. In order to raise the potential of underwater hotels to generate much more tourism fees, these first two streams of the economy will have important cyclic development benefits. The taxes and fees would be generated as new value is generated, some of which are a source for other public product investment, such as infrastructure maintenance.
For some remote coastal communities or islands, marine and lake tourism can also attract these types of visitors. The construction and post-opening service industries for offshore marinas and underwater hotels directly involve an increase in the percentage of service jobs in a region. The development of underwater hotel facilities, diving, and other tourist facilities in the city also created employment and output. Because of the construction operations and anyone applying for employment that funded the construction, the incomes of these individuals are increasing as a result of spending the extra sales. It was seen afterwards that an added $160,000 was produced in output and nearly half of it was taxable. The final influence showed a potential effect of contributing all the operational duties to construction and operations. In the village of 14,000 people employed by the Soviet-built submarines, when replaced by Russian businessmen, the reasonably priced “Lutra” hotel was taken over, a three-star hotel in Ecaterinburg.
Environmental Impact and Sustainability
Many researchers believe that the success of underwater tourism has considerable potential to generate significant social, economic, and even environmental benefits due to its ability to promote marine conservation and stewardship through the development of a productive and responsible relationship with the ocean. However, very few of these studies have considered the negative environmental impacts of the technology and developed proposals for how to manage these while seeking the potential conservation and commercial gains. Not all potential negative impacts were equally likely to occur: health and safety risks, pollution potentially resulting from the deconstruction of the hotel, and underwater tourism driving down property values for those living above are easily avoided through responsible management practices.
While fully submerged underwater hotels made of glass or acrylic are unlikely to have direct impacts on surrounding marine systems, the construction process is the most important part of our proposed life cycle for underwater hotels in terms of potential environmental impacts. Tourism uses and support systems do also carry the potential for direct impacts on marine systems, including discharge of sewage and waste from the hotels onto issuers of the vast majority of neck stags diets build will result in an MSDS review. We also developed guidelines for the design and implementation of new technology development within the project that might have wider applicability: future exotic underwater hotels, or indeed any permanent or semi-permanent installations of high value in the marine environment. Complete engagement and integration of environmental concerns in the design process in order to produce a specification and a suite of supporting management practices designed to consciously and deliberately reduce, where they cannot be prevented, all realistic negative environmental impacts while enhancing the positive ones, is a separate issue.
Challenges and Future Prospects
Challenges
Overall, underwater hotels of man-made structures encounter financial, technical, promotional, and conservation concerns. With specific respect to the cost, it should be pointed out that a large-scale underwater hotel with plenty of guest rooms cannot reach a feasible commercial return just from the hotel itself. However, combined with a possible sightseeing observation (70-100 yuan per person), the financial outcome may be dramatically better, which needs the support of market survey feedback. Yet even under the condition that the hotel opens sightseeing tour, investment for the construction and maintenance is still large. Several scholars raised that only when the per capita auxiliary investment income is more than 50% of entertainment investment can economic feasibility be improved. Businesses need to invest in providing entertainment. With respect to the high costs of technology, it is obvious that a key bottleneck of the artificial undersea hotel lies in cutting-edge technical bottlenecks related to sealing and underwater pressure, corrosion resistance, and the environment adaptability of facilities.
Future Prospects
The marine tourism sector is more complex and diverse than the relatively limited national character of the Netherlands, which becomes merely a rich source of models for successful management, not a source of innovations in product development anymore. In this line, man-made islands, including island villages that form and grow in time with local resources, culture, or specific economic predictions, are more likely to be developed than underwater hotels alone. However, underwater hotels connected with sightseeing towers have favorable development prospects. In addition to relatively mature technology, a large body of production methods has been accumulated in the construction and maintaining of oil fields and oil rigs. Viewed from the demand side, marine tourism possesses strong potential for growth. In the years to come, domestic tourism will have undergone a shift from landscape to seascape. Presented in 1999 and based upon Chinese statistics, the China Institute of marine development predicted that the potential number of travelers for China’s first two underwater-sea-view restaurants reached 68.65 million in 2005, yielding a total revenue of 1 billion yuan at a price of 15 yuan per person. Official records depicted that, in 2000, China launched legal procedures of applying to the UNESCO for inclusion of the Hainan Island tropical marine landscape in the World’s Natural Heritage List (WHL). A number of successful cases make inestimable contributions in promoting domestic marine tourism at one stroke. From a supra-domestic viewpoint, these ambitious multi-projects could enhance coordination and contribute to environmental protection over local aquatics industries. Examples include making efforts to promote fishermen’s ability to sustain themselves, addressing the threats posed by a rapidly decreasing aquatic biodiversity, and conducting efforts of the construction of a coral reef within “The Sustainable Development Program for Sino’s Island Nations.”