Maldives Complete Blog

Surfaris, Spacations, and Snorkelooza

Maldives Complete — Fri, 24 May 2013 11:29:04 GMT

In the growing world of travel options, the holiday industry is getting more and more specialised in its offerings and positioning. This trend was one of my motivations to starting Maldives Complete in order to help people navigate the growing range of resort options and styles. Maldives has long been a destination for (a) honeymooners, and (b) divers, but in recent years, it has been also established a worldwide reputation for (c) snorkelling, and (d) surfing. It is also an outstanding destination for families which was one of my earliest inspirations for building the website.

The Maldives has been renowned for indolent seclusion and lazing about in the sunshine with the counter downside perception of there being “nothing to do”. But now many resorts offer extensive water sports centers, underwater features and a range of creative activities and events tailored for the most esoteric interests.

As a result, many of the emerging “travel buzzwords” enumerated in the Telegraph’s recent article “The most irritating travel buzzwords” are on offer in the Maldives…

Spacation – spa trip
Floatel - a hotel on water
Voluntourism - combining a holiday with charity work
Spafari - safaris combined with "wellness"
Flightseeing - viewing an attraction, the Grand Canyon, for example, from an aircraft
Digital detox - a holiday without your mobile, tablet or laptop
Twixmas - a short break between Christmas and New Year

The Maldives is also a center for another term – the “Surfari” – as described in the recent Newswire piece “The Rise of the 'Surfari' Highlights the Maldives' Potential to Appeal to Active Holidaymakers”. I think that the Maldives’ biggest world-leading activity of Snorkeling also needs its own buzzword. “Reefcation”? “Snorkelooza”?

Best of the Maldives: Flower Name – Mirihi

Maldives Complete — Tue, 21 May 2013 07:48:59 GMT

100^th Chelsea Flower Show, one of the bellwethers of sunshine and blossoms in climate-challenged England, opens today. To mark the occasion we have our own online exhibit of botanical curiosity. Mirihi not only has it’s very own blossom, but it is its namesake. GM Martin Vossen describes, “Mirihi is named after the flower! :) I think it can be found on other Islands as well, but I have never seen it anywhere else and I would not be aware of where else it can be found, so it is really quite unique.”

Best of the Maldives: Fresh Lobster – Kandooma

Maldives Complete — Sat, 18 May 2013 09:50:41 GMT

Luxury + Seaside = Lobster

Wherever you place luxury next to the seaside, at the top of the restaurant hierarchy will always be lobster. It pretty much defines the pinnacle of seafood cuisine. Today being Lobster Day, perhaps a few of you with be donning the plastic bib and wielding the nutcrackers and silver picks.

So no surprise that lobster dinners are pervasive throughout the Maldives. Especially since they do live in profusion just metres away and just about any diving or snorkelling excursion will stumble upon one or more hiding under a crevice. But if you don’t want to get wet checking out these crustaceans in their native environment, then check out Kandooma’s lobster pen. Set in the resort’s lagoon by their pier, they have set underwater fencing in an area about the size of a pretty ample swimming pool and they keep their lobsters there. No piles of lobsters crammed on top of each other in a restaurant lobby fish tank. Their final days awaiting their dining table fate is spent in a spacious and natural home environment.

It also means that you can get some pretty big boys into the pen. The specimen in the photo above is about as big as my thigh (and my thigh is not small). And the number to choose form is just as large as we counted several dozen when we sat observing them crawling about.

I’ve never found any variety of lobster to be as tender and sweet as the famous Maine Lobster from where I grew up, so I don’t splurge for these delicacies very often in the Maldives. The most tempting preparations are those dishes prepared with a bit of local and gourmet flair that bring something extra to this exquisite ingredient. Kandooma’s luxury restaurant specialises in lobster dishes offering a broad range as well as a very tempting Lobster Gourmand Menu. It also offers a number of lobster dishes as part of its ‘Fishermans Market’ event held every Wednesday.

Free range lobster!

Maldives Virtual Film Festival

Maldives Complete — Wed, 15 May 2013 07:42:00 GMT

Cannes Film Festival starts today which is a great showcase of fine smaller, independent productions like Norway’s “Kon Tiki”. Which as it turns out features the Maldives as the setting for the final scene (at the resort of Biyadhoo it seems). It’s no surprise then that it was film director Francisco Negrin who alerted me not only this Maldivian cameo (“Just watched kon tiki, this year's oscar nominated norwegian film. The final scenes, when the raft hits Polynesia, were filmed in the maldives...”), but also all the films ever set in the Maldives.

If you want to have your own Maldivian Film Festival, then if you search IMDB for “location = Maldives”, you will get a list of over 33 films such as ‘The Island President’, “Caught Inside”, and “Dhinveynugehithaamaigaa”.

If I hadn’t saved up all my vacation time for visiting the Maldives, I might be traipsing about Cannes flogging a script myself (yes, like any self-respecting Los Angeles resident, ‘I have a script’). A script of a Maldivian story. If anyone is interested in producing a paradise-set cinematic tale, then drop me a line and we can do lunch. Plot: “Accountant becomes pirate.”

Best of the Maldives: Live Aboard Combo – Four Seasons Kuda Huraa / Landaa Giraavaru

Maldives Complete — Sun, 12 May 2013 07:46:20 GMT

Maldives Complete also doesn’t do boats in its profiles or ‘Best of’ reviews. I’ve shied away from getting into the whole ‘Live Aboard’ segment of Maldives holidays because, like Guest Houses, I’ve never been on one so I wouldn’t know which criteria to feature or how to write about it.

But, this post’s distinction is sort of a resort/cruise hybrid so it just passes. It’s sort of the ultimate water villa. A mobile water villa.

We have always fantasized about taking a cruise boat actually as a way to see lots of nooks and crannies of this mystical archipelago. Having been to many resorts and enjoying the discovery of new gems, the notion of touring along a stopping at all sorts of little islands off the beaten path and then retiring to the ultimate in ‘water villas’ sounded entrancing.

We can see the appeal of such a floating holiday…

If you ever wanted to try out the mega-yacht life for the experience of your very own (ever see those gigantic yachts parked in swish harbours with ports of call on their bow for ‘C.I.’ and ‘V.I.’ and wonder what staying on them would be like?).
If you’ve ever thought of going beyond even the picnic island excursions of resorts to the most secluded and far flung hidden parts of the Maldives strung together like your own customised ‘virtual’ resort.
If you are thinking of an extended (time and budget) holiday over say two weeks and definitely want to split into two resorts

Well, any of these have crossed your mind, then the Four Seasons has an offer for you with their Four Seasons combo offer on the exquisite Four Seasons Explorer offers a brilliant option.

22 guests
39 meters
1 suite
10 state rooms
Wi-fi (this surprised me…I thought I would have to forfeit my digital connection for the tour)
Underwater videography
Kayak, snorkel, water-ski
Spa therapist on board

Another possible title for this post is “Billionaire for a Week”. Like my “Billionaire for a Day” post. The price of chartering the Four Seasons Explorer is $16,000 per day (last I checked) for whole yacht. For 22 people that’s a bit over £500 per day which isn’t exactly billionaire price bracket. But it certainly is the billionaire lifestyle.

Best of the Maldives: Power Snorkelling – Keyodhoo

Maldives Complete — Sat, 11 May 2013 07:17:40 GMT

I don’t do Guest Houses, but I do do Snorkeling.

I’ve shied away from adding the new Guest Houses in the Maldives to the Maldives Complete database for a few reasons. First, I’ve neverstayed in one so I have no real first-hand experience to understand the key characteristics to profile. Second, there is less information on them on the web for me to research. They are often small mom-and-pop operations and comprehensive websites are not often provided.

But I have been a big advocate of Maldives being the best place to Snorkel in the world. And from that perspective (and in the spirit of ‘Best of the Maldives’ distinctives and uniques) I just had to add a post about the Keyodhoo guest house’s new ‘Power Snorkeling’ activity…

“Power Snorkeling – Only available at Keyodhoo. If you like snorkelling, you’ll just love Power Diving! With Power Dive’s free-floating Power Snorkel, you can dive to 6 metres with a friend for more than an hour on the 35 a/h battery. There are no tanks to carry, wear or refill and, after your dive, simply recharge or exchange the battery and do it all again! You don’t need a dive ticket to use it. View video in sidebar. $35 per couple, or $20 per person.”

Best of the Maldives: Lowest Population Density – Soneva Fushi

Maldives Complete — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:44:03 GMT

Not a person in sight.

What most of the prospective visitors on Forums ask about is the lowest population density. Perhaps burnt by crowded beaches and resorts elsewhere in the world, they are drawn to the Maldives by the tranquil seclusion. Relative to these other sardine seasides, even the highest density Maldive islands we have visited always seem sparse by comparison. Seeing fellow guests on the beach and around the island is always a bit of a rare event. I often ask ‘where is everybody’.

But if you want the ultimate in Robinson Crusoe human isolation, then Soneva Fushi is the expanse for you. Unlike most resort profile pictures, the pervasive natural landscape is evident from its aerial shot (see above). Mathematically, Soneva has 65 rooms on a 688,500 square meter island which is an agoraphilic 10,592 square metres per room. Perhaps not surprisingly, the ‘Population Density’ filter was suggested by a friend (Mark Richardson) who happens to be a Soneva Fushi devotee.

In my ‘best of’ filtering, I’ve excluded resorts that are not on their own island (eg. Equator Village on Gan, Traders Hotel on Male) because even though the ‘rooms per hectarage’ is small, there is lots of other infrastructure and ‘residents’.

To be low in density, the trick is to (a) be rather large in size (the numerator in the equation), (b) not have water villas (which add rooms beyond the land area). So for some who prefer the smaller more intimate islands and the luxury of a water villa, a low density is not a big appeal.

And if that density is still too crowded for you, Soneva has their distinctive picnic island (see below) where the density drops right down to nada.

Best of the Maldives: Highest Population Density – Safari Island

Maldives Complete — Mon, 06 May 2013 08:30:01 GMT

One trick to SEO is ‘keyword density’, ie. packing each page with the words ‘Maldives Resort’ every where. I didn’t think you folks would appreciate such gratuitous, self-serving clutter so I’ve avoided such contrived measures.

One trick to ‘Population Density’ (ie. rooms per square metre of island) on a Maldives Resort is lots of water villas. And the new leader is the new kid on the block. Safari Island now wins hands down in the ‘Population Density’ stakes. Maldives Complete has all the population densities of all the resorts. The previous king of cozy was Jumeirah Vittaveli with 91 rooms on 14,000 sqm for 154 sqm per room. Safari has 84 rooms on 8,000 sqm for 95 (!) sqm of island per room. Another relative newcomer has also opted for the jam them in approach, Centara Ras Fushi (140 rooms on 29,000 sqm for 215 sqm per room).

But on the horizon is a resort that Dutch Docklands is building whole resorts in lagoons with no island at all. Mathematically, a population density of infinity (that’s what you get when you divide by zero). Actually, the other Maldivian Jumeirah, Dhevanafushi, already sort of has an ‘all water villa’ feature with its complete detatched ‘Ocean Pearls’ villas set out in the middle of the ocean (see below), and Gili Lankanfushi pioneered the boat-only water villas with its collection of residences.

Help Me Help Others

Maldives Complete — Thu, 02 May 2013 23:48:00 GMT

I need help. Despite the steadily increasing traffic, the regular fan mail, the positive words from Facebook and TripAdvisor forums, and the resort support, Maldives Complete still does not rank highly in search engine result pages (SERPs). The site has a very credible Page Ranking of ‘3’, more than many pages that seem to come higher in the results.

The issue is that lots of people investigating the Maldives as a destination for the first time often won’t find Maldives Complete unless someone in-the-know tips them off to it. That means that those prospective visitors get lured to crappy commercial sites that just provide a little bit of generic tantalising information and then bombard them with holiday offers.

One of the things that first frustrated me driving me to develop Maldives Complete was the vacuous and shallow commercial websites that always barged to the top of the search engine results when I searched for “Maldives resorts”. Because Maldives holidays are so expensive, there’s a lot of incentive for operators and website cowboys to produce mediocre websites with a few stock images and then put lots of money into Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that will thrust them to the top of the rankings. Everywhere I go in the Maldives travel industry, most experts and aficionados now know of Maldives Complete and share generous and kind praise the work it is doing. Still it’s a cut-throat world when lots of money is involved. Even the well-done sites that I promote, link to for their quality and get praise from in private, don’t put links to me I guess out of fear that I will draw lucrative traffic away from them.

The praise for Maldives Complete is backed up by the stats. Its web traffic has grown steadily since its launch with a particular surge in recent months (eg. 20% traffic growth just last month). Since the outset, an average of over 40% of the daily visitors were ‘Return Visitors’ meaning that people like what they saw and have come back for more.

But the most telling and also curious statistic is the referrals from search engines. For most websites, this is one of the most common sources of people finding the site. But with Maldives Complete, only 27% comes from search engines. The rest come from (a) ‘No Referrer’ meaning they typed the name straight into the browser, or (b) email sites (eg. mail.yahoo.com) meaning someone emailed them the link). Despite a very respectable Google Page Rank of ‘3’, MaldivesComplete doesn’t show up in the top 1000 results of a search on ‘Maldives resorts’. By contrast, Adrian Neville’s authoritative site SevenHolidays has a Page Rank of ‘2’ but still shows up at position 26.

One of the key drivers to search engine position is links backlinks. Because I don’t make any money out of this site, I haven’t had any resources to go out with PR campaigns and SEO initiatives to buy or market such ‘link juice’ (and the SEO gurus call it). Since so much of the popularity of MaldivesComplete seems to be driven by word of mouth and regular readers, I thought I would send out an appeal for links. If you have an appropriate site (eg. something to do with travel or the Maldives) and you think that MaldivesComplete is useful, then any link you can put on the site to MaldivesComplete will help the search engine bots to value it as highly many of you seem to. Thanks for any support you can provide. Hopefully it will help others to find and benefit from this tool to find just the right resort for them.

Best of the Maldives: Employees Choice Employer – W Retreat

Maldives Complete — Wed, 01 May 2013 06:57:27 GMT

“W” is for “Worker” on today’s International Worker Day. And in the Maldives,”W” – as in ‘W Retreat’ - is for workers too. According to the definitive source, the Maldives Resort Workers themselves…

“MRW congratulates W Maldives for being the best employer in 2012 and urge other resorts to make a fair attempt to get the title of the best employer in 2013. For most of the resorts, it’s just a matter of coming clean through accounts to give a fair distribution of service charge to the staff, which is by law entitled to staff.”

This ‘Best of the Maldives’ accolade was actually already awarded to W Retreat back when Maldives Complete first started in 2009. But this updated and comprehensive survey provides both quantitative validation and fresh recognition for W Retreat’s enduring focus on this area.

Today’s post has also prompted the addition of yet another Category tag for the site – ‘Management’ (which is actually a bit of a pet subject for me).

Best of the Maldives: Astronomy Week – Gangehi

Maldives Complete — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 14:35:00 GMT

Most of the special events in the Maldives take one down into the water (like Six Sense Laamu’s Water Wo/Men event). But equally as sparkling as the turquoise lagoons and shimmering reefs is the firmament of stars above. Usually at least once during our Maldives visits, we lie down on the warm sand after dinner to gaze at the night sky packed with stars with a flourish of Milky Way across the middle.

Resorts are catching on to this night time showpiece with increasing numbers offering telescopes, beach star gazing sessions, eclipses, observatories and special events. In fact, today’s post has prompted me to add a new category tag – ‘Astronomy’.

Gangehi is going a step further with an entire ‘Astronomy Week’ devoted to celestial celebration. The line-up includes…

Stargazing
“Astro-millionaire” game
Brief after-dinner astronomy talks
Let’s take a shoot to the moon
Astronomy walks

As it happens, tomorrow we enter the ‘Lagu’ period of the ‘Seed Moon’ which is Celtic for ‘Flowing Water’ (!). The Runic Calendar of Nordic traditions, which is governed by half months rather than full months, divides this moon of the year by Man (Human) from April 14th through April 28th, and Lagu from April 29th through May 13th.

If you are interested in marking other big astronomical events in your diary, then check out this handy reference chart for 2013 of "13 Must See Star Gazing Events in 2013".

Star attraction!

Best of the Maldives: Twitchers – Sun Island

Maldives Complete — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 08:21:41 GMT

Another sanctuary for the airbourne is Sun Island’s Kovelivaa park, the biggest bird sanctuary among the Maldives resorts.

As it happens, today is Audubon Day established on the birthdate of the world’s leading ornithological illustrator, John James Audubon. Sometimes, Audubon Day (celebrating wild fowl) and Arbor Day (celebrating wild foliage) are celebrated together by planting trees in bird sanctuaries like Sun’s.

There is more to the Maldives fowl than herons (it seems as it every resort has its resident heron who combines stalking the lagoon shallows for fish with posing like a fethered statue for hours on end to charm the guests). Two lesser seen examples of Maldive bird life found on Sun Island are described below by the resort…

White Breasted Waterhen (Amaurornis phoenicurus) - “These white breasted waterhens are very calm and like to go along doing their work silently, unnoticed. As the name suggests, these birds are the water counterparts of normal hens and can be seen mostly near edges of water bodies. In [Sun Island’s] IIT, the best places to see them are the lake behind SAC and IITG lake. When no one is around, they are bold enough to venture on the roads, so watch out for them! Local names: Assamese”

Asian Koel (Eudynamys scolopacea) – “Asian Koel is a large cuckoo which feeds mainly on fruits and berries in trees, feasting on the ripe fruits. It also consumes insects and caterpillars. Adults often frequent orchards.”

Megatick!

Best of Maldives: Airport Terminal – Shangri-La Villingili

Maldives Complete — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:15:18 GMT

One of the best ways to see the otherworldly images of the Maldives is by taking a seaplane transfer to your resort. In the beginning, such transfers were cumbersome affairs where you sat in a sweaty, open-air hangar. But now, most of the 5-stars have developed their own swanky lounges at Male airport for seaplane transfers with cappuccino, tropical juices and other amenities. Shangri-La Villingili have gone one step further building an entire dedicated terminal…

“’The terminal, at Gan International Airport in Addu Atoll, is a five-minute speedboat ride to the resort and is for the exclusive arrival and departure of the resort's guests. A private lounge offers one-stop immigration, custom and baggage screening services. ‘With Gan airport, we have found the ideal partner to provide guests arriving by private jet a unique experience, unmatched convenience and privacy,’ said Rene D. Egle, the resort's general manager. Guests taking advantage of the new private jet terminal also can try the resort's ‘Private Jet Experience,’ which features a stay in a 10,000-square-foot presidential villa with a butler and daily massage. Those who fly by private jet can now land five minutes from paradise. Shangri-La’s Villingili Resort and Spa is the first five-star resort in the Maldives to open its own private executive airport terminal.”

Best of Maldives - Online: Interactive Map – Dreaming of Maldives

Maldives Complete — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:37:00 GMT

Like the resurgent corals, the vibrant inter-web thingy just gets richer and more colourful every day. When I launched Maldives Complete, there was a really dearth of good, useful information about the resorts. The resorts themselves had weak and limited websites. Nowadays, things are much more sophisticated.

Probably my second favourite Maldives website, after Maldives Complete, is Sakis Papadopolous’ ‘Dreaming of Maldives’. Just as I started with an anchor of a comprehensive database, Sakis’ starts with simply the best collection of images on the Maldives around. But like Maldives Complete, he hasn’t rested there and has branched into a range of other areas. His section on families, “The child-friendly Resorts in Maldives, all the Kids-clubs,’ remains one of the most comprehensive reviews of resorts on the Maldives. He has started to move into videos with dazzling results. And his latest innovative addition is this ’Maldives Photo Map’.

When I first launched Maldives Complete, one of the fun bits I added was the DeepZoom control of the British Admiralty Maps of the country. As I launched it, you can zoom into the charts to exacting detail. I had fantasized about pushing this party trick even further. I had pictures for both aerial shots of the island and prominent features like the swimming pool. I had thought that once one zoomed into an island, you would see an aerial photo (see directly below). And if you zoomed in on the photo, then it would take you to a shot of the pool (see bottom). A bit like a Russian doll photographic drill down reminiscent of the second half of the iconic film, ‘Powers of Ten’.

In the end, I didn’t see a lot of traffic on my interactive map and Microsoft never really developed the Deep Zoom technology much. Its editing tool, Deep Zoom Composer, remained klunky and incomplete. So I decided it would be too much work to add these extra layers of images. Also, soon the Google and Bings maps caught up on the imagery and so the aerial shots were pretty good. And now Sakis has taken the final step of allowing you to zoom even closer into gorgeous shots of island highlights.

Pol-ypdate

Maldives Complete — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 08:27:07 GMT

They grow up so fast.

The Four Seasons have always had a website that allowed you to look up your Reefscaper coral frame and see how it was progressing, but now they have just relaunched a special website, Marine Savers, to provide not only frame update lookups, but also detailed information and updates on the ever broading range of their Maldives-leading conservation initiatives.

Above is our frame (KH0327) we planted in November 2010 at Four Seasons Kuda Huraa. Toddler-sized growths are looking pretty attractive compared to the collection of broken pieces that we affixed to the iron frame. Curiously, our frame (LG0729) planted during our visit to Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru that same week is doing notably less well, but still clear healthy growth from the fragments first affixed.