7 Floors & 7 Stars Below Sea Level - Istanbul and Poseidon Underwater Hotels

This seven floor underwater hotel will give its guests a new view of the famous city of Istanbul. It is due to open in 2010, and will coincide with its Culture Capital of Europe nomination and lay down a gauntlet as a world capital of tourism. The hotel is the work of Tanriverdi Holding and have set aside a multi-million dollar budget to ensure the project is finished to 7 star standards. The underwater hotel trend emerged over a year with a project in Dubai. This new project shows two unique characteristics - it will be based in the city center and will go one floor further underwater. The underwater hotel is being built on the ruins of a historical 1930s tobacco factory and will have restaurants, exhibition halls, and rooms all with sea views.

It will be interesting to check-in and check-out the underwater hotel rooms and facilities, as local experts suggest that the underwater visibility of the Istanbul Bosphorus Strait (which is the body of water that links the Black Sea, to the north, with the Sea of Marmara, to the south) is about ten feet.

Poseidon is a $500 million complex marketed as the world’s first underwater hotel. The Poseidon Mystery Island will be a 1.1 million square foot complex submerged 40 feet into a 5,000 acre coral lagoon near Fiji. The project has been underway for some time now, but the big news is that the Fiji location has now been secured.

“When I was in high school, I was always writing letters to Jacques Cousteau and sketching underwater habitats,” Jones recalls. In 2000, he took the first step toward the real thing, offering a reward to whomever found the best location for his futureundersea playground. “I’ve got a lot of friends in the submersible business who are also scuba divers,” he says. “So I put the word out that if someone came up with the perfect spot, we’d pay them $10,000. A business associate and avid diver suggested a reef off the Bahamian island of Eleuthera and collected his reward.” But Jones eventually ran into trouble negotiating a price for the site with its American owners. After a year of fruitless back-and-forth, he decided to set his sights farther afield, on Fiji.

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