travel

The World’s First Underwater Hotel Villa Opens in the Maldives

At $50,000 a night, this once-in-a-lifetime experience—literally sleeping with the fishes, stingrays, turtles, and sharks—doesn't come cheap.

In 2005, architect Ahmed Saleem deferred his dreams and settled for opening the world’s first underwater restaurant, Ithaa, at the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island resort. At Ithaa, diners can eat five-star cuisine, five meters under the Indian Ocean, watching sharks and blue tangs swim past as they dine under an acrylic canopy. It’s an architectural marvel that would be the highlight of many designers’ resumes, but not for Mr. Saleem, as he is known around the resort. What Mr. Saleem really wanted to build was an underwater bedroom where he could spend the night dreaming under the sea and wake under the waves. This year, he finally got his dream in The Muraka, an all-glass hotel room that sits 16.5 feet under sea level.

This Exclusive Club at Disneyland Costs $25,000 to Join.

Down a quiet street in the New Orleans Square section of Disneyland, far from the mouse-riddled streets of Downtown Disney, sits a secret clubhouse. This is no offshoot of the famed Mickey Mouse Club, though, nor is it a place to spot princesses eating breakfast. Instead, it’s an ultra-exclusive restaurant and bar for the Disneyland elite, possible investors, visiting dignitaries, and, of course, celebrities.

Club 33 is a meeting place for the rumored 500 members willing to pony up $25,000 for membership fees, plus $12,000 a year in dues for the privilege of eating and drinking in the shadow of Sleeping Beauty‘s Castle.

The Man Who Wants To Send Us To The Bottom Of The Ocean.

Stockton Rush–more Musk than Cousteau–has a grand plan for the deep sea, beginning with trips to the Titanic. Required: curiosity, ample liquid assets.

Stockton Rush is one of the few humans who owns a submarine, but initially what he really wanted was a spaceship. “I wanted to be the first person on Mars,” says Rush, and while that’s a common flight of fancy, Rush was serious. At 19, he became the youngest jet transport-rated pilot in the world and then went on to earn a degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton. He worked on F-15s and anti-satellite missile programs, with the aim of eventually taking part in the space program. It wasn’t until 10 years ago, at the age of 44, that he realized his dream of being an astronaut on a trip to Mars was just not going to happen, because as he sees it, there’s no economic reason to venture to the Red Planet. “If someone would tell me what the commercial or military reason to go to Mars is, I would believe it’s going to happen,” says Rush. “It’s just a dream.”

The boo-tiful business of ghost tourism.

When most people hear about the ghosts of Wall Street, it’s fallen titans of industry, specters of deals gone awry, or business barons of the past that come to mind.

Not for Annaline Dinkelmann.

“There are many ghosts on Wall Street,” said Dinkelmann, the entrepreneur who runs the Wall Street Walks Ghost Tour throughout the month of October. “Fraunces Tavern has many ghosts,” said Dinkelmann. “They’ve had murders there that have left many ghosts. There are several ghosts in the Battery Park area and, of course, the ghosts in the cemetery. Alexander Hamilton is one of them. He’s seen at the Trinity Cemetery where he is buried as well as up at City Hall.”

The Hilton Effect: The hotel looks back on its trillion-dollar global impact.

A few weeks ago, I stowed away on Norwegian Air’s Fill A Plane campaign, where they transformed their brand-new Boeing 737 Max passenger plane into a cargo jet and filled it to the brim with supplies bound for a UNICEF outpost in Chad. After a long flight from Copenhagen to N’Djamena, we unloaded the plane. While the 13 tons of supplies—2,000 water purifiers, 1,000 doses of antibiotics, 35,000 packs of rehydration salts, and more—were headed to the Gaoui refugee camp and local hospitals, we were headed to our hotel. After rolling in a convoy through darkened dirt roads, we pulled up to the hotel—a Hilton, one of the few hotels that had remained open in the Central African country.

Celebrity Cruise’s Flora is an eco-friendly bet the company can turn the tide on cruising.

The cruise industry is not great for the planet. A new ship designed with a delicate ecosystem in mind could be a step toward changing that.

The cruise industry transported over 26 million customers last year, and while that was good for its bottom line (raking in upwards of $117 billion in 2017), it was not good news for the planet. In 2016, Pacific Standard reported that “each passenger’s carbon footprint while cruising is roughly three times what it would be on land.” In addition to contributing to global carbon emissions, cruising can also contribute to serious health issues and air pollution. In France, 10% of air pollution in the port city of Marseilles can be directly contributed to the shipping industry.

China to Ban Unusual Architecture.

Visitors to China frequently admire the country’s love for unusual buildings. There’s the sky-high diamond-shaped Famen Temple near Xi’an, Beijing’s geometrically-challenging CCTV headquarters, the Starship Enterprise office building in Fujian, Wuxi’s teapot-shaped tourist center, and the snail-like Henan Art Center in Zhengzhou to name just a few. For better or worse, China has earned an international reputation as a playground for architects.

Now, that could all change. According to CNN, China has taken the move to ban weird architecture. On the heels of the nation’s first Central Urban Work Conference since 1978, China's State Council released new guidelines for the country’s urban planning. The rules could dramatically change the skyline in some of the China’s cities—and ruin the annual contest of ranking China’s ugliest buildings.

Inside the secret laboratory where Marriott is cooking up the hotel of the future.

As anyone who’s pulled off the interstate late at night knows, hotels like Marriott, Residence Inn, Sheraton, and Aloft are frequently neighbors, lined up side by side on the outskirts of town. It’s less usual to see them side by side in a basement in Bethesda, Maryland, though. Yet two stories below Marriott International’s sprawling headquarters, they do just that.