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For $260 a night, you can stay in this Boeing 727 airplane-turned-hotel suite perched 50 feet high in Costa Rica - take a look inside
For $260 a night, you can stay in this Boeing 727 airplane-turned-hotel suite perched 50 feet high in Costa Rica - take a look inside
Katie CanalesJul 17, 2018, 03:43 IST
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Upon first glance, you might think this Boeing 727 in the photo above had an unfortunate crash landing in the jungle.
But it's actually a hotel - and yes, you can stay in it.
The fuselage, or the frame of an aircraft, is one of many accomodations offered by Hotel Costa Verde, a vacationer's dream resort nestled in Manuel Antonio National Park, located in Quepos, Costa Rica. Its many lodgings and amenities include not just the Boeing 727 fuselage suite, but also a restaurant carved out of another airplane, a "Cockpit Cottage" built out of an Aéropostale aircraft, and a rail road car-turned-restaurant.
There's clearly an architectural theme here.
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Take a look inside the unconventional vacation digs of Hotel Costa Verde:
Staying here is not your run-of-the-mill hotel experience. how often can you say you lived in an airplane, even for a brief time? The suite has an outdoor deck over each wing ...
... one of which affords viewers sights of the jungle and the Pacific Ocean.
Inside are two bedrooms, both of which are air-conditioned, and two bathrooms. A total of three queen-sized beds are offered to guests.
And each bedroom has a private bathroom.
The carved-out fuselage home is outfitted with teak panelling that's locally-sourced from tropical hardwood trees.
And in case you forget that you're lodging in an old airplane, the bedrooms have the original cabin windows intact.
Former flight attendant Faith Mulvihill, the owner and leasing agent of the 727 Fuselage home, told Business Insider that the unique facilities are the brain child of Hotel Costa Verde owner Allan Templeton.
Upon graduating from Yale, Mulvihill said the "rather eccentric" graduate joined the Peace Corps and never returned to the US.
His latest project was transforming yet another plane, this time from the Soviet Union, into an event center for the resort.
"He never stops," Mulvihill said.
From September through mid-November, you can stay in the suite for $260 a night. Outside of those months, the costs soar north of that price.
And in addition to the fuselage in the sky, there are other villas and condos to rent across the hotel's many accomodations in the area.
If the 727 fuselage suite is booked, Hotel Costa Verde offers similar accommodations about 100 meters away, called the "Cockpit Cottage," which can only be accessed by a suspension bridge.
The seclusion makes this suite the more romantic getaway.
A kitchenette sits where the pilots once flew the aircraft.
This plane originally belonged to the defunct French airmail company Aéropostale.
The airline was the first to fly between France and South America. The clothing brand of the same title found Aéropostale's "sense of adventure" inspiring, adopting its name as a result.
A little ways down the road from both airplane-turned-hotel suites is the El Avion restaurant, fashioned out of a shot-down Fairchild C-123 airplane.
This one has a rather rough history.
According to Mulvihill, the C-123 is fabled to have been shot down over Nicaragua during the Iran-Contra affair, a secret arms deal-turned-political scandal during the Reagan Administration in which the US traded weapons to Iranian terrorists in return for the release of American hostages.
Funds from the deal were also used to support an armed conflict happening in Nicaragua at the time.
But this area in Costa Rica has clearly been reborn, just like the Boeing 727 home. In its former life, the 727 plane flew on routes conducted by South Africa Air and the Colombian aviation company Avianca Airlines. You could say it's now enjoying its life in retirement.