Find your type!
February 27, 2025
‘It is essential to know what type of pool you want: virtually all choices in a design and development process depend on this!’
Whether you are an owner, alderman, civil servant, architect, developer, operator, builder, or advisor in the field of use, operation, and development, starting the development of a new swimming pool/water park: it is essential to know what type of pool you want!
The degree of recreational use is often a hot topic: this requires the most creativity and often also space and budget (public money!) and therefore this is where we start. In many town halls or meeting rooms, this aspect will have been extensively discussed. It is worth mentioning that swimming pools nowadays compete with a huge number of other activities. If you want to attract sufficient audiences, you cannot avoid offering more recreation and experience than perhaps was the norm in the past.
Prevent boredom, limited usage options, half-baked choices, missing specific target groups, (operational) problems in the future, problems with expansions, and especially a wrong offering of pools and water attractions. And yes: you get what you pay for, but you have to spend money to make money, to throw in two particularly apt proverbs.
Because I often have discussions about this topic at an early stage, I have created a ‘cheat sheet’ in which I distinguish 5 types of pools/water parks linked to a recreational level, on the basis of which discussions often run much more smoothly.
Of course, behind these 5 types there are many follow-up choices, for example about the design day (=number of visitors on an average good day), the attraction capacity (both aimed at active and passive entertainment), size (both of building, ‘wet area’ and a possible outdoor section) and the required investments (price per square meter) appropriate to both size, target groups, concept (atmosphere, experience, theming, finishing) and capacity.
In short: all ingredients for fun discussions and sketch sessions.
See the cheat sheet below: click to enlarge.
