Trending: Leisure Pools that make a bigger splash

Did you spend your weekend rubbing oily shoulders at a swamped lido, coughing up salt water at the beach, or calling out the fire brigade to extract you from a minute paddling pool?

If only you'd been at Marina Bay Sands, the hotel with a 150m-long rooftop pool that flows over the edge of a skyscraper, 55 storeys above Singapore. You might have wanted to leave your vertigo behind, mind.

Luxury hotels vying for attention will often offer guests extraordinary opportunities for swimming. Singapore will soon welcome a second sky-high example. The Sky Habitat's twin 38-floor towers will be linked by a bridge of crystal waters – provided all goes to plan, the jet set can get wet there from 2016.

For the greatest pool or, depending how you look at it, aquatic folly, head to the San Alfonso del Mar resort in Chile, where the pool, the world's largest, is as long as 20 Olympic pools and costs £2m a year to maintain. It has fake beaches and offers sailing. But if that's not enough, a few steps away you'll find another beach – and the Pacific Ocean.