Discovery Cove has quietly retired the Shark Swim name, and its own booking pages have not caught up
Type the old Discovery Cove Shark Swim address into a browser today and you will not land on it. The page answers with a redirect and drops you on a different one, called Shark Snorkel. The redirect is a 302, the temporary kind, not the permanent 301 that normally marks a finished rename.
Discovery Cove's own sitemap stamps that change on Tuesday, August 25. The retired Shark Swim page and the Shark Interaction page were both touched about a minute apart that morning, at 14:14 and 14:15 UTC, which is 10:14 and 10:15 a.m. in Orlando.
Two tiers, two prices
The shark experience is sold as two separate products.
Shark Snorkel is listed from $79, with "Only 24 Spots Per Day." Discovery Cove describes it as a deep water free swim and lists five resident species: Pacific blacktip, nurse, zebra, whitetip reef and bonnethead. It markets the tier as swimming with over 20 sharks.
Shark Interaction is listed from $169, with "Only 16 spots per day" and an "Ages 10+" badge. That age floor is not what separates the tiers, since Discovery Cove sets the same 10 year minimum on Shark Snorkel. It adds a feeding and training session that Discovery Cove aquarists conduct while guests step into the shark habitat, on top of the same snorkel. Guests booking it are told to arrive no later than 8 a.m.
The rename is visibly unfinished
The old name has not actually been scrubbed. Four references to it are still live across the two booking pages.
On the Shark Snorkel page, the new name is used throughout, but one line of fine print still says part of the proceeds supports the Guy Harvey Foundation under the "Shark Swim Program" name.
The Shark Interaction page is further behind. It still carries three references to the old name, including two in its own booking instructions: one telling guests to arrive at the check-in cabana ten minutes before their Shark Swim time, and another warning them not to book both Animal Trek and Shark Swim, because the two are scheduled to start at the same time.
Those are the practical instructions a guest reads while booking, and they still point at a product name the website no longer uses.
The old address has not been fully retired either. One level down, the Shark Swim medical information page still loads on its own, with no redirect, under the title "Shark Swim Medical and Health Information." The retired name appears eight more times in the page's own copy. The two renamed programs have their own medical pages, and both of those still carry the Shark Swim title as well.
What we are not saying
Worth being precise here, because the timestamps only support so much. The Shark Snorkel page itself is not new. Discovery Cove's sitemap dates it to July 14, well before this week. So the two tier structure is not what changed on Tuesday. What changed is that the Shark Swim address stopped resolving to its own page and started pointing at Shark Snorkel instead. The timestamps are Discovery Cove's own declared modification times, so they show when the company says those entries changed, not necessarily the minute the redirect went live.
Discovery Cove has not announced any of this. There is no press release, and no outlet had picked it up as of Wednesday morning.
Sources
- Discovery Cove Orlando, Shark Snorkel
- Discovery Cove Orlando, Shark Interaction
- Discovery Cove Orlando sitemap, for the modification timestamps
Image credits: All photos by Discovery Cove Orlando.
