One of the more popular parts of Maldives Complete, based on one of its most Frequently Asked Questions, is the House Reef rating. When I introduced this Resort field, I grappled with a number of approaches, but settled on a quite vague set of parameters:
- 1 = distinctive, ie. there is something distinctive about it which might have been its overall strength or even something as simple as an exciting resident creature or feature.
- 2 = good, ie. this was a house reef worth snorkeling with most of the basics ticked like good topography and marine life.
- 3 = problems, ie. this house reef had some consideration-worthy problems like inaccessibility or disappointing marine life, etc.
- 4 = no information
Given that vast complexity of considerations (cf. The 8 Ds of a Great House Reef – Maldives Complete Blog), any further granularity would, I felt, be putting too fine a point on it.
TripAdvisor Forum contributor “Ventsi” of Bulgaria has taken an initiative on the Forum to create a crowd-sourced Reef Rating for house reefs which has some reasonable legs to it now – Reef rating system, crowdsourced – Maldives Message Board – Tripadvisor (Reefs – Google Sheets)
The approach takes vetted contributor’s ‘ratings’ on a scale of 1-10 and then aggregates them for an average. I tried this with Resort ratings when I first started the site (which is why the field is called “Average Rating”). Years ago, operators all put their own star-ratings down and I aggregated those for an average. I abandoned maintaining the averages because everyone was calling everything “5-star”. I would say don’t take the granularity of Ventsi’s ratings too seriously (ie. Don’’t chose one resort over another because it has a house reef 0.3 points better than another. It would be good for Ventsi to add heat-map conditional formatting to automatically provide a bit of segmentation.), but it can be an effective way to measure general quality based on crowd-input.
The challenge is figuring out what people mean by “reef quality”. Some people like visibility, others fish soup, others special residents, others underwater topography, others coral variety and color. Lots of data should iron out various biases (37 assessors so far) though awareness of it and interest in contributing will introduce a bit of its own self-selection biases. It is great to get lots of people because they see lots of reefs. My personal reviews can provide a consistent perspective (like following a particular film critic whose opinions align with yours or at least you know how to calibrate relative to how you tend assess films), but only for the reefs I can snorkel. Furthermore, reefs aren’t static but change constantly especially over the years. So my observations from a decade ago are likely to be dated in many ways.
Given that the contributors are vetted to a degree, it is sort of a Rotten Tomatoes for house reefs that can provide some helpful input to people researching house reef quality as a major consideration to their Maldives visit.
