Once upon a time, a diving board by the hotel pool was an almost obligatory part of a holiday. Today, springboards, usually around one metre high or lower, are rare, and in many places they have been replaced by waterslides, swim-up bars and infinity pools.
Tom Cheshire describes the diving board as a place suitable not only for children but also for adults. From it, one could perform a simple jump, a backflip or the so-called „bomb“ – tucking the body in mid-air and making a loud splash into the water.
„What happened? It all comes down to safety and the fear of lawsuits,“ Cheshire writes.Their disappearance has not been attributed to a general legal ban applying to all hotel pools. According to the author, during the 1980s and 1990s, insurance premiums for pools with diving boards rose sharply. For hotels, this meant higher costs and greater liability in the event of an accident.
Jumps can lead to serious injuries if a person lands back on the board or hits the bottom of the pool. In rare cases, the consequences can be life-changing, including spinal injuries. The possibility of lawsuits is one of the factors that prompted many hoteliers to remove the facilities.
At the same time, safety requirements became stricter. Pools with diving boards often have to be at least 3.5 metres deep, while the diving area must be around 10.5 metres long. The aim is to prevent a person from reaching the sloping bottom leading towards the shallow end of the pool.
These conditions limit the places where hotels can install a diving board and make its maintenance more expensive. An additional cost is the need for lifeguards and broader insurance coverage. Thus, in the more cautious environment of modern tourism, many hotels have chosen to do away with the attraction.
One of the rare examples is the Cormoran Hotel in Cattolica, near Rimini, Italy. The complex has a large pool with a diving board, a counter-current swimming facility, a jacuzzi and a separate children’s pool.
Another well-known example is the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, southern France. Its diving board, however, is not above a pool but leads directly into the sea.
For most holidaymakers today, the choice is between waterslides and pools with different designs, while the diving board remains a memory of a less regulated kind of holiday. Whether hotels will dare to bring it back remains an open question, but for now the facility is more an exception than a standard part of a hotel holiday.