If you’re beginning to think about booking a summer sun getaway in Europe, Cyprus offers some of the best beach destinations, according to TripAdvisor users.

The island nabbed two of the top three beach destinations in Europe, with Ayia Napa, the party capital which made its name as a notorious party paradise, in top place.

Protaras, another Cypriote tourist resort, took third place, just below the Greek island of Skiathos, a small island famous for its white sand beaches.

It’s every holidaymaker’s worst nightmare — arrive at the hotel late one night, rise early the next morning to head to the beach and discover that, in the light of day, your hotel isn’t so much “beachfront” as “beach-near.”

Some hotel operators get away with making outrageous claims regarding proximity to the beach, and although online tools such as TripAdvisor and Google Earth’s satellite imaging have made fact-checking easier, that five-minute walk to the sand is still a nasty sting for plenty of vacationers.

Enter The Beachfront Club, a new hotel resource which aims to end this uncertainty by obtaining verified data on how far hotels are from the nearest stretch of sand — and listing only those who are nearly right on top of it.

Imagine a beach where the sky is always blue, it’s never too hot or cold, the water isn’t filled with salt and pollution, and the surf is always perfect.

Welcome to Ocean Dome, the world’s only indoor beach! Ocean Dome is known as the world’s largest indoor water park with a retractable roof.

The air temperature is always kept around 30º C and the water temperature is kept at around 28º C.

The InterContinental Fiji Golf Resort & Spa on Natadola Beach, one of the world’s best beaches, is to open on 1 June 2009.

Spread across 35 acres of tropical gardens, InterContinental Fiji Golf Resort & Spa is the sole destination resort on Natadola Beach – the only stretch of natural, white sand beach on the main island of Fiji, Viti Levu.

Protected by a reef to create an aqua-blue ocean facing lagoon, Natadola Beach was voted by Forbes Magazine in 2008 as one of the 25 best beaches in the world.

Versace, the renowned fashion house, is to create the world’s first refrigerated beach so that hotel guests can walk comfortably across the sand on scorching days, reports The Australian.

The beach will be next to the the new Palazzo Versace hotel which is being built in Dubai where summer temperatures average 40C and can reach 50C. The swimming pool will be refrigerated and there are also proposals to install giant blowers to waft a gentle breeze over the beach.

The 10-storey hotel will have 213 rooms, several with their own internal swimming pools, plus 169 apartments. Fifteen more such hotels are planned.

700 South Ocean Boulevard, Manalapan Beach, Florida : A look at the positioning of this luxury real estate could inspire anyone to dream of their ideal waterfront lifestyle.

Offering quiet surroundings in the heart of Florida’s Gold Coast, the prestigious oceanfront enclave of Manalapan Beach lies in Palm Beach County, between the Town of Palm Beach and Boca Raton.

Distinguished by its remarkable size (five-and-a-half acres with approximately 500 feet of frontage), the property also offers the exceptional allure of both private beachfront and dockage capability for virtually any size yacht.

This slice of South Florida waterfront paradise is listed by Premier Estate Properties , Inc. (source luxuryportfolio) for $42,900,000. The property affords extraordinary investment potential, and could be subdivided into a total of 3 separate lots should development be of interest.