The best InterContinental hotel in the world? We have a winner …. inside a cave in China!

InterContinental has some very pleasant hotels. I should know … I stayed at their Dusseldorf, Boston and New York Times Square hotels last month, and I’ve also written a review about the Carlton in Cannes in the past.  Do a search in the search box in the top right corner to find them.

It’s fair to say that IC LeGrand in Paris is also my favourite hotel (on a value / quality / location combo) in that city, and I’ve happily booked people into the IC Park Lane in London as well.

But … you know … they seemed to be missing ‘something’. And now I know what! For a start, none of the floors of these hotel were actually built underwater, giving you views of fish floating by. None of those hotels was built inside a massive cave, either.

Luckily, InterContinental is now fixing these schoolboy errors with a new project in Shimao, China:

Want to waterski on a lake outside your room? No problem! Want to eat in an underwater restaurant? No problem!

This is the site at present, although construction work has started:

If you think this is all nonsense, then it is worth mentioning that the project is being masterminded by WS Atkins. Atkins is the British civil engineering group that designed and built the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, and has a track record in actually pulling off this sort of thing.

In typical ‘waste no time’ Chinese fashion, the opening date is pencilled in for 2015. The cost is estimated at £345m, which seems a little cheap by Western standards (the refurbishment of the London IC a couple of years ago cost £75m).

You can read more about the project here.