Social Tedium

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Instagram maldives

Maldives Complete has been from its debut a place where I can play with the latest web technologies – Blogs, Active Server Pages, Splash, Dynamic HTML, DeepZoom. When Instagram took off about a decade ago inflecting the social media craze especially in the travel arena and photographic media, I figured I would to experiment with it and see what it had to offer the online landscape and experience. What content could it help me with for the site? What could I curate? It did provide an unprecedented flood of Maldives images which I started curating in the Listicles (another trend peaking at the time with sites like BuzFeed). Quickly, Insta became dominated by scantily clad (naturally for the tropics) pretty faces (most of whom women though I did ferret out and showcase a number of male ‘influencer’ wannabes). After a while, the novelty new imagery wore off and I stopped featuring Instagram collections on the blog.

Maldives Complete does have its own Instagram feed, but I don’t put hardly anything on it. Only a few of my very faourite pictures. People sometimes ask me why I am not more active on this social medium. I do continue to monitor the geotag “Maldives” daily to see if anything interested gets posted, but I’ve got even more disenchanted of late where this tag is less about the destination and more about the posing content creator. The “model” in the shots is not a personal touch to the depiction of the place, but rather the front-and-center focus pushing the destination far into the background. Just this week, 26 of the top 27 featured posts are bikinis (including the top 9). Wondering if this wasn’t just the Facebook algorithm pandering to its expected preferences of a middle-aged bloke, but I checked my wife Lori’s computer and her feed fed up the same geotag posts. Unfortunately, this platform is becoming more self-absorbedly focused on the poster than the subject which is less interesting to me.

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Reciprocity

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maldives reciprocity

As I noted in my review, the increasing costs and challenges of maintaining the Maldives Complete website brings the second most frequently asked question once again to the fore…”Why do I do it?” Well, Seth Godin, a fellow blogger with regular insights into this question shared another recently:

  • “Our biggest commitments, the things we are most dedicated to, rarely pay us back in equal measure. That might be the point.” Seth Godin
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Maldives Complete-ly by the Numbers 2025

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2025 Complete-ly by the Numbers

Happy 17th Anniversary to Maldives Complete. This has been a bit of a topsy-turvy year for the site. About this time last year I was musing about whether to keep putting in the massive time and money to keep Maldives Complete going (“Should I Keep Maldives Complete Going?”). Then I got a major boost from Siyam who wanted me to come to their two properties, Olhuveli and Siyam World, which gave me the impetus and lots of great content for 2025.

But the news of the year, AI, has appeared to have boosted the site profile big time. After years of gradual increments in traffic, 2025 was record year for the site. Investigating the cause, the major driver appears to be the arrival of the big LLMs like ChatGPT and Copilot. AI devours data ravenously and there is nothing like a Maldives Complete buffet of data with its 2700 posts and unmatched databases. I’ve done a bit of research this year for the site on various Maldives topics and have been using ChatGPT and the like more and more. A bit surprisingly, the engines came back with answers footnoted to the Maldives Complete site as the source. A few other webmasters that I know who have high quality content have also reported getting a big boost in traffic over the same period with similar indicators. One of my challenges is people finding Maldives Complete after all of the commercial sites have paid an arm and a leg for Google ads and SEO to squeeze me out of the search result, but the LLMs appear to be more objective in their looking for relevant content to share (not to mention that the SEO hounds buy the position in line with a only little bit of content, but a lot of selling).

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Best of the Maldives: Wing Beans – Joy Island

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Joy Island - wing beans

Living in the UK after decades away from America we still celebrate the feast of Thanksgiving, but we do it on the Sunday following the official American holiday (as we don’t get the Thursday off as a holiday). So we will be gorging on all sorts of traditional harvest dishes including a range beans – green beans, lima beans, runner beans. During our recent visit to Joy Island, we discovered a new bean – wing beans. Sort of the wing dings of vegetable with their eponymously quirky shape.

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Best of the Maldives: Coconut Feast – Veligandu

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Veligandu - coconut day

For the complete coconut experience Veligandu welcomed chef Cristian Marino to craft a completely coconut experience to celebrate World Coconut Day this past year.

“To honor this day, Chef Cristian Marino created a special culinary journey for guests at the resort. The menu was simple in concept yet rich in flavor:

  • Fresh island salad, where the bite of vegetables met the delicate crunch of grated coconut
  • Coconut rice, creamy, fragrant, almost velvety — a dish that carried the perfume of the tropics
  • Local fish with coconut sauce, blending sea and tradition in one dish.
  • coconut brownies, a nod to comfort food with a Maldivian twist.

The dining room itself joined the celebration. Palms and coconuts were used as decoration, with tropical flowers set between the buffet stations. It was not just a menu but an atmosphere, an experience shaped around one ingredient.”

He talked about his experience in the Maldives on his own blog as well – Experience Sabato Italiano: An Italian Dinner in the Maldives – Cristian Marino.

Veligandu - coconut chef

Velignadu - coconut

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Best of the Maldives: Coconut Seller – Siyam World

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Siyam World - coconut stand

On most islands, landscaping staff will readily find a coconut for you direct from the trees, and some resorts have special stands to serve up free coconut, but at Siyam World guest get their coconut the Maldivian way. Coconut stands are the equivalent of the “water cooler” on local islands where locals gather to chat and hang out. Not only does Siyam World have a typical coconut stand, but they also recruited an actual coconut seller from a nearby island who was lured out of retirement to take his trade to the resort.

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World Travel Market London 2025

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WTM 2025 - Siyam

This week was my annual pseudo-Maldives visit attending the World Travel Market in London where the Maldives tourism board always has a massive presence populated by a range of industry players but mostly the resorts themselves coming to speak to prospective agents and operators. Also, the Siyam group has gotten so prominent, especially in the UK market, that they occupied their very own dedicated area right next to the Maldives. Between the two stands, the Maldives occupied the front to back of the exhibition hall.

The annual event is a chance for me to escape the clocks-going-back, damp dreariness of oncoming British winter and wander among the tropical imagery of our fav tropical destination catching up with friends old and new from there. The show always brings out the true legends of the industry who have been side by side with me promoting the Maldives tourism industry for decades now: Jason Kruse (photo below), Aminath Hudaa, Scott LeRoi. In the past, I often made new acquaintances with the owners and key players in the resort where I could learn about their properties and they were keen to share experience and perspectives. But in recent years, the sector has grown so big and corporate that many of the people there are sales reps based out of HQs in Singapore, Dubai and Bangkok who were just focused on flogging inventory. The highlight of the day was the late afternoon reception hosted by the Siyam group launching its new branding which was packed with enthusiastic fans of the properties.

WTM 2025 - Jason

WTM 2025 - overview

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Best of the Maldives: Pumpkin Mashuni – Siyam

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Siyam - pumpkin mashuni

Lori loves her Mashuni on our Maldives trips. But having it every day on our visits can get a bit samey (though different properties and chefs can have fairly different styles of preparation). So she was delighted to come across Pumpkin Mashuni at Sun Siyam Olhuveli (but it turns out that al the Siyam properties serve it). Something to use those leftover jack-o-lanterns for.

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