What is the useful life of tiles pools versus gunite?

[chazas]

I built a pool a few years ago in Honolulu so I have some experience with this.

We chose gunite and plaster, despite everyone's recommendation to go with tile. When house-shopping, every tile pool we saw had a bunch of missing tiles. That didn't seem to be a good sign.

We did have tile in our spa, which our contractor insisted on. They had to redo it completely once - it was so bad. The other problem is that there is very poor access to tile in Honolulu. Our contractor "forgot" to hold the tile we selected and when it came time to do the spa and the waterline there were literally only 2 choices in stock on the entire island of Oahu. My partner basically cried at the Daltile office - and they released us some tile they were holding for someone else.

In the end, our plaster job on the pool itself wasn't the best - but we never had it corrected because we were in a dispute with our pool contractor about some other things, and he hadn't paid the plaster sub. We just lived with it. And we were definitely happier with it than we would have been with tile that was falling off.

I loved having a pool in Hawaii, but getting it built was a complete nightmare. Just prepare yourself. The main problem is that the pool industry in Honolulu is that it's just too small.

Good luck.