The chance to win the Ultimate Honeymoon Competition 2011 begins from 4 April. However, not everyone will be lucky enough to win an £8,000 honeymoon package inclusive of travel and accommodation to beautiful, exotic Bali. But if you and your spouse-to-be are self-confessed beach bums, you can do the next best thing – start planning your beach holiday by the sea.
Helping you on that front is the The Beachfront Club, a new website that lists out the best beachfront hotels in the world. Now, “best beachfront hotels” does not necessarily mean the “most expensive”. The Beachfront Club has listings of several thousand hotels (about 6,500 at last count), but these range from five-star luxury properties to more reasonable oceanfront bungalows.
The Beachfront Club is not terribly bothered about how luxurious the accommodation is – although the properties are rated based on price, ambience and service. Four dollar signs indicate how expensive a given property is, while stars indicate the ranking. But The Beachfront Club website is more concerned with whether or not a given hotel is located right on the beach. It is not enough to offer an ocean view. The hotel must be located bang, smack on the seashore. There should be no jam-packed road separating it from the beach and no buildings blocking access to the sea. If these criteria are not met, a given hotel will not make it to The Beachfront Club’s listings.
The idea is to help travelers choose beachfront accommodation without being taken for a ride with false promises of accommodation along the ocean shore. So far, The Beachfront Club has listed some 6,500 hotels. However, it plans to increase this list to 10,000 soon. Still in its beta version, The Beachfront Club website does not claim to be completely accurate. In fact, on its homepage, the website invites feedback from people who can add to the list and / or inform the site about incorrect inclusions.
The Beachfront Club website has been designed as a site that is easy to sift through. Thus, the homepage boasts of a large map that occupies most of the page. Move your cursor over the map to choose a given location. Click, and the area expands to offer a more detailed view of the region. Further clicks and you can reach the hotel listings for a given city or town.
Once you have an idea about where you want to spend your beach holiday, check out the destinations list on the right-hand column of The Beachfront Club homepage. Clicking on each entry leads you to a more detailed list, until you reach the listings for individual cities and towns. There is also a search bar, where you can key in you choicest destination, click and get the results instantly.
Europe clocks the most entries at 1513. Asia comes in second with 1342. Thailand and Bali are The Beachfront Club’s launch destinations, so these two places have the most detailed entries. The site’s listing is far from done, but for beach holiday fans, The Beachfront Club is likely to become a very popular online destination.
Via: ABC News
