InterContinental Bora Bora Resort Offers Ultimate Eco-Luxury Couples Incentives

The InterContinental Bora Bora Resort & Thalasso Spa sets the bar in French Polynesia for large eco-luxury incentive programs, in terms of both the eco and the luxury. The experience begins as you exit the prop plane onto the tarmac at Bora Bora Airport, where you’re immediately confronted with one of the world’s most iconic tropical images. Monolithic spires of a crumbling volcano tower into the heavens inside a mesmerizing teal blue lagoon rimmed by a circle of low lying coral atolls. The rugged peaks lend an aura of prehistoric drama juxtaposed to the elegant resorts tucked along the atolls, all with unblemished white beaches and gin-clear water.

From the airport, everyone hops into their respective hotel’s fast ferry for the transfer inside the placid lagoon. It’s about 20 minutes to the InterContinental where we’re greeted by a heavily tattooed Maori man blowing the traditional conch shell greeting.

Quite possibly, I’m the only single visitor from here to Hawaii. Bora Bora is one of the world’s top honeymoon destinations, and right away you realize everything here is designed to help propagate the human species.

The grounds are thick with palm trees and fat ferns. The 80 overwater villas are the largest in Tahiti, stretching out into the lagoon along wooden piers emanating from the resort’s hub. On land, the pool is bookended by the two restaurants, the fun and funky-luxe Bubbles Bar and the long talcum powder beach.

Picking me up at the dock, hotel manager Christophe Maudet stops our golf cart near the beach so we can watch the afternoon’s manta ray feeding. Every day at around 2pm, a school of stingrays show up in the knee deep water to be fed by guests. Because the water is so clear and so shallow, it’s a very up close and personal experience in the stingray’s natural habitat.

DEEP OCEAN SCIENCE
How the hotel protects that natural habitat is a helluva story. Marlon Brando purchased the private island of Tetiaroa after he visited Tahiti to film Mutiny on the Bounty in 1962. He became friends with Dick Bailey, who owns the four area InterContinental hotels and Paul Gauguin Cruises. Brando was an inspired environmentalist and he proposed to Bailey the idea of sourcing cold 40°F water from the sea floor for refrigeration and A/C, instead of cooling warm water on land electrically, requiring the use of dirty diesel generators.

With inspiration from his famous friend and Dr. John Craven, chief scientist at Honolulu’s non-profit Common Heritage Corporation, Bailey built the world’s first “closed-loop chilled water distribution system” when the hotel opened in 2006. It’s called “SWAC” for short: Seawater Air-Conditioning. The cold water pumped up from 2,800 feet below sea level is used throughout the main resort, spa and overwater villas, which negates the need for about 650,000 gallons of diesel fuel yearly.

The system will pay for itself next year.

I requested a tour with Maudet out to the edge of the atoll where you can see the big supply pipe disappear into the depths. We also looked inside the main control room. Maudet was proud to show off the inner workings of the entire system and the series of original black and white photos on the wall of Brando, Bailey and the innovative construction phase itself.

“There’s nothing like this in the world,” he says. “We usually have about 20-25 guests per week ask for this tour. More and more, people want to know about these kinds of things, and what impact their visit has on the environment.”