March 2020: Cabo Verde Added as Country 205 and Pools Close
In March 2020 we added Cabo Verde as the 205th country, reviewed listings in Germany, New Zealand and South Africa, and watched pools close worldwide during the pandemic. Two Cabo Verde hotel pools are our Pool of the Month.
Our March 2020 pool listings update covers a new country, Cabo Verde, and the closure of swimming pools around the world as the COVID-19 pandemic spread. The directory also came within 94 listings of 25,000.
Milestones
We added the 205th country to the site: Cabo Verde, an island nation west of the African continent that is made up of 10 islands. We found five hotels on three of them, including the two featured below.
March also marked 24 years since the directory first went online. John Lorimer, a Denver-area Masters swimmer, had the vision for that and did all the work to put the first editions of the database online.
Pools and the pandemic
By the end of March, world travel had come to a standstill, many businesses had closed, and swimming pools everywhere were shutting down. Site traffic fell from an average of about 2,000 page views a day to about 200 and was still falling.
We kept working on the listings throughout. With everything closed we had more time for it, but closed pools were slower to answer our questions.
Site development
We have been working with a new programming partner to move the site to a new server, reduce our reliance on Google Maps and prepare for some site enhancements. We expect the move to the new server and the switch from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap to take place in the first half of April. Most of the changes will be subtle, but you will notice a difference. Once the site is stable, we plan to start rolling out new tools.
Listing reviews
In March we reviewed all the listings in the German states of Saarland and Saxony and updated all the listings in New Zealand. We then returned to Germany to review Saxony-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein.
We are now working through South Africa's 224 listings. After that we plan to finish Germany with its last state, Thuringia, then move on to one or two of Canada's western provinces and then to Austria or Switzerland.
Pool of the Month
Our Pool of the Month for March 2020 features two neighboring hotels on Sal Island in Cabo Verde: the TUI BLUE Cabo Verde and the
