Resorts Find Image in Pool Extravaganzas : ‘Swami’ Adds Water for Instant Success

When Howard Fields, a 39-year-old former prune farmer and pig rancher, finds the time to settle back on his 51-foot sailboat on San Francisco Bay he thinks of swimming pools.

Big swimming pools. Huge swimming pools.

Multimillion-dollar extravaganzas with waterfalls, water slides, tons of sand, tons of fake volcanic rock, lights and hundreds of swaying palm trees.

Friends and colleagues call him the “Water Swami.” He calls himself an exhibitionist who discovered that building enormous swimming pools gave him “all the glitz and pizazz I was looking for.”

For his efforts, Fields is helping transform the growing leisure travel industry.

Self-Taught Builder

Fields, a medical school dropout and a self-taught builder, designs and constructs what he calls “water features,” mainly for commercial enterprises like hotels and theme parks. The projects range from mere fountains to enormous bodies of water that can accommodate hundreds of swimmers at a time.

In September, his largest work to date will open on the island of Hawaii--a seven-acre lagoon designed for the new $360-million Hyatt Regency Waikoloa. Guests will be invited to dive into the lagoon stocked with native sea life, including dolphins, lobsters and squid.

The hotel complex will stretch for nearly a mile along the shores of Waiulua Bay, and Fields is building a waterway that will carry guests from the lobby to their rooms in boats.

Slides Connect Pools

The hotel grounds actually will have six separate pools, five of them built on different levels and connected by water slides. Hyatt says it is spending $8 million on Fields’ Waikoloa fantasy.

“I see it as a six-acre aquarium forming a foredrop for the biggest resort in the world,” Fields said.

Fields speaks of most existing hotel swimming pools with disdain, particularly those lined with row upon row of look-alike chaise lounges.

“All you can do is get bored and sun-tanned,” he said.

Hyatt, the privately owned, Chicago-based corporation that earned a reputation in the late 1960s for soaring atrium lobbies, first hired Fields in 1984, and he does about 35% of his work for the firm.

So far he has finished water attractions at seven of the chain’s resorts, at an average cost of more than $3 million.

In Guinness Records

The company took over a failing hotel in Puerto Rico and brought in Fields to help salvage the property. He constructed a $3.5-million “river pool” nearly 1,800 feet long, a monster moving waterway of 14 waterfalls, four water slides and other features that take the typical guest 15 minutes to float past.

The Guinness Book of World Records called it the world’s largest freshwater swimming pool.

Hyatt says the resort’s occupancy jumped 20 percentage points, enough to pay off its investment in the first year.

In late 1986, Hyatt opened another Fields creation in Scottsdale, Ariz., a work of 10 separate pools, 47 waterfalls and 28 fountains.

Sand Trucked to Arizona

To create a beach, Fields trucked in 250 tons of sand from Monterey, Calif., which his research showed to be just the right quality for bathers. He said it doesn’t stick to the body as readily as other sand, a godsend for maintenance men and hotel maids.

For a new hotel on Maui, Fields is designing a series of locks--like those found on canals--that will raise and lower swimmers about 15 feet between different pools. If the plan is realized, the resort will have small, individual islands that guests can rent.

Fields’ creations are part of Hyatt’s plans to capture a larger share of the growing leisure market. Darryl Hartley-Leonard, president of Hyatt Hotels Corp., says the company’s resort business has grown between 10% and 15% a year, a trend he expects to continue into the 1990s.

2 Dozen New Resorts

By 1993, the company plans to spend at least $3 billion on about two dozen new resorts, each equipped with water playgrounds costing $3 million to $6 million.

Brian Wilson, a leisure industry analyst in Phoenix with the accounting firm Laventhol & Horwath, said resort developers have seized on water as a means to distinguish their properties from the competition.

“The competition is fierce and more resorts are being built every day,” Wilson said. “Developers and builders have to do something to distinguish their hotels from their competitors’.”

Leisure analyst Charles Kaiser, of Pannell Kerr Forster in Los Angeles, said Hyatt is a leader in creating water “atmospherics” and agrees with its strategy of going after more leisure travel dollars.

“I would say that over the next five to 10 years, leisure travel will far outstrip commercial travel in growth. If a hotel is targeting on that market, it’s targeting on the right market,” he said.