World’s Only Floating Hotel

World’s Only Floating Hotel

By Yeo Kim Sen, The Sunday Times, March 20, 1988

The Four Seasons Barrier Reef Resort: Fully booked up to May
THE world’s only floating hotel, anchored in a coral lagoon on the John Brewer Reef (part of the Great Barrier Reef), opened on Friday. Three weeks after it was christened The John Brewer last month, Cyclone Charlie came a-visiting. But the sturdy made-in-Singapore vessel weathered the storm and is already fully booked on all weekends up to May.

The 176-room, five-star hotel called the Four Seasons Barrier Reef Resort, has all the facilities of an international hotel, including a below-decks disco aptly called The Boiler Room. Room rates are rather up market with twin/double room starting from A$248 (S$372) and executive suite with balcony from A$475 up.

Local shipyard Bethlehem Singapore Pte Ltd was the builder of the seven storey ship, which has an operating weight of between 10,000 tonnes and 12,000 tonnes. Owned by Barrier Reef Holdings Ltd, it had a total project cost of US$28 million and took some 400,000 man hours to build.

I was among the first Singaporean to go aboard the hotel-ship at its Great Barrier Reef anchorage. Cyclone Charlie, I was told, only slightly damaged the swimming pool and tennis court.

Charlie struck with wind speeds of between 130 kmh and 150 kmh and passed a short distance away from the hotel on Feb 28, less than a month after the vessel was christened by the Queensland premier, Mr Mike Ahern, on Feb 5.

“The cyclone sent two-metre high waves up to the second deck of the hotel. It was raining so heavily that we only saw water through the glass panels and windows of the hotel,” said the floating hotel’s project engineer, Mr Claes Aman. He and his wife, Mrs Maria Aman, 28, a housewife, stayed on through the cyclone with six other hotel staff. According to him, anchoring the hotel in the John Brewer lagoon helped minimise the damage. Outside the lagoon, the waves were 6 m high, he said.

One of the important safety features of the hotel is a mechanism that allows the vessel to move in the path of least resistance during very rough seas and cyclones, thus reducing the possibility of damage, Mr Aman said. The John Brewer Reef, an oval-shaped reef some 3% km wide and 7 km long and 12 m deep in some parts, is one of the more than 2,500 clusters of coral reef stretching over more than 2,000 km of the Great Barrier Reef along the north-east coast of Queens- land. The floating hotel is a dream-come-true for Australian entrepreneur Doug Tarca, who first thought of the project 25 years ago. Another of his dreams-come-true – Fantasy Island – was also recently completed. The A$1 million man-made island is now berthed in a creek in Townsville and will be towed out to the Great Barrier Reef later this year.