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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Crowd-Sourced Reef Rating

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Crowd-sourced reef rating

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.

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Should I Keep Maldives Complete Going?

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Google results

You would think that after 16 years, maintaining Maldives Complete would get easier, but it seems every year it just gets harder. Not because it is growing (actually, the traffic has been pretty constant…another frustration), but rather because I am working harder just to stand still. In recent years, I wonder whether my latest research trip will really be my last. The balance of the considerable financial cost of hosting and researching not to mention the hours of work against the benefit of engaging with the Maldives travel industry as a participant rather than a spectator is getting less and less favourable.

The increasing challenges include:

  • Commodization of Content: When I started, content on the destination was hard to find. It existed mostly in paper travel catalogues from travel agencies (remember them?) which actually served as the source for lots of my early pictures. Now content and photos are everywhere. The issue used to be “there are so many resorts how do I choose?”, but now it’s “there’s so much content how do I choose?”. Supposedly such a situation could lead to a demand for curation, but that is not happening really (and AI could very possibly leapfrog the requirement for it).
  • Google Games: SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) on Google has now become a purely mercenary process with position going to the highest bidder with the deepest pockets (not me) and Google is even downgrading non-advertisers to make them harder to find (so they can optimise click-through revenue on their promoted sites). For a good analysis of this dynamic, watch “Why Google Search is Falling Apart”.
  • “Influencer” Fatigue: I’ve written a couple of pieces about these disfunctional wannabes ruining content creation (“9 Top Tips for Maldives Influencer Collaboration”, “10 Things Luxury Resorts Look For In An ‘Influencer Collaboration’”).
  • Corporatization of Properties: Corporates don’t go for distinctive. They go for cookie-cutter convention. Coasting on the destination’s natural beauty and climate made famous in the Instagram age, so many corporate resorts shun true creativity. Global marketing departments focus on quantity over quality more concerned with KPI numbers than captivating content.
  • Tragedy of the Commons: The people who should value a superfan of a destination are the destination themselves. I understand that most of the benefit of the Maldives Complete site is the country itself rather than any individual resort as I am helping people get to the destination, but not making any guidance about where to go (ie. no shilling). In the early days, the MMPRC was hugely supportive (especially Aima Hudhaa), but in recent years it is just focused on trade shows and international operators.
  • Indirect Benefit: “Most widely bookmarked Maldives site in the travel industry” is how one Maldives travel specialist described Maldives Complete. Its benefit to resorts is indirect (ie. it helps agents who help people choose a particular resort) and doesn’t help marketing managers with the numerical metrics.
  • Content Harder to Create – After 2600+ “Best of the Maldives” posts, it gets harder to find new true distinctives and originals. I struggled to write about a property I visited recently because even though it was a great property, it was very similar in spec and approach to lots of others in its price class.

In many ways, the Maldives has grown up as a travel destination and doesn’t need my help anymore. It is gratifying to receive the piles of fan (e)mail raving about how helpful Maldives Complete was for their travel planning, but crowd-based support hasn’t extended much beyond the kindly worded thank-yous. For the vast majority of people, the Maldives is a once-in-a-lifetime trip. So while they appreciate my help, once they have visited, they have no further use for me. And those who can afford to come repeatedly either (a) like to repeat their favourite resort (saves doing research and taking chances on somewhere new), or (b) have admins and agents to do their research for them.

The net result is that the website is a lot of work and expense for diminishing benefit to me.

I’m not looking for VIP treatment nor blagging complimentary stays (like the hordes of irritating “influencer” wannabes), but it also doesn’t seem right to pay extra (because I end up paying full rack racks and can’t shop for deals) along with added expensive transfers (which run around $500 and I am changing resort every day or every other day) for an experience is not a relaxing holiday in paradise, but instead running around taking photos for the database, researching pieces, getting resort information and material al for the purpose of helping the property and destination.

Patrick Staerke, Jason and Victoria Kruse, Sonu Shivdasani, and Scott Le Roi are old school industry leaders who fell in love with the Maldives long before it was the darling of Instagram. They have been the stalwarts of support who have been vital in keeping the site alive for one and a half decades. Also, the avid fans of the site like Francisco Negrin and Paola Lamperti not only buoyed me up with their enthusiasm for the site, but also helped extensively with the research.

I remain hopeful that the main benefits of Maldives Complete are a valuable resource for the destination and its prospective guests:

  • Utility: Sometimes it seems like the marketing departments do everything possible to make it hard to get the basic information you want to for your prospective visit. Lots of eye-candy photos of palm trees, spa candles and sunsets without the practical details people seek out. Also, putting everything into an interactive database helps with the most common question “With so many resorts, how do I choose?”
  • Unified – A key aspect of its usefulness is its unifying ALL resorts (not just a selection) – past, present and future – into one place to make for easier reference and comparison.
  • Unbiased: It’s near impossible to find an objective source of information on the resort. With so much money at stake, the vast majority of content is promoting some inventory.

So, should I keep it going? Any ideas about how to get more support?

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Maldives Complete-ly by the Numbers 2024

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Complete-ly by the numbers 2024

Happy 16th Anniversary to Maldives Complete. The site motors along – resorts sending me material, fans sending me “Best Ofs” they’ve spotted, prospective guests sending kudos as well as queries for their trip planning. It’s still an expensive endeavour for the site maintenance, hosting, and research trips.

One of the costs of its longevity is legacy technology. When I developed it on ASP.net active server pages, it was the state of the art for the web. Now, I needed upgrade my machine which forced me into full 64-bit mode (no more 32-bit emulation), which meant completely new versions of various applications, which meant that lots of the tools I had come to rely on for site development and maintenance no longer worked. So I had to embark on a two-month technical project to upgrade all my tools and the code for the site.

Social media engagement has completely plateaued (and thinking of dropping Twitter, aka X, completely because it is so useless for small properties and just geared to big players (and people kibbitzing the big guys). After the surge of the late teens (2015-2018) where there was double-digit net new (ie. the new resorts minus the ones taken out of commission for refurb or just shut down) resorts online, the growth plummeted during the COVID years, but has now hit double-digits again for the first time in 6 years.

The blogging has tapered to a pretty steady “every 3 days” pace, when earlier in its history it has been mostly every other day and very early, nearly every day.

I appreciate all of the support from the destination fans and industry.

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Once a Journalist

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Togo journalist

  • “Once a priest, always a priest; once a mason, always a mason; but once a journalist, always and forever a journalist.” – Rudyard Kipling

Journalism Day today which reminded me of the earliest roots to Maldives Complete…my lifelong avocation in journalistic writing. I embarked on a life of “journalism” in elementary school penning a weekly newsletter for the youth programme at church called “Juice Man”. I then started and edited my high school’s first page in the local paper (the “Ramblin’ Clam” in the Ipswich Chronicle). My first “professional” journalism gig was as an overseas correspondent focusing on travel writing about the West African country of Togo. The Maldives Complete’s interactive database stems from my similarly long technology, but the now 2400+ article blog stems from this life of reporting intriguing stories about intriguing places.

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Maldives Complete-ly by the Numbers 2023

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Maldives - Completely by the Numbers 2023

A decade and a half of Maldives Complete. While other Maldives websites have come and gone (eg. pioneering guide writer Adrian Neville’s Seven Holidays), Maldives Complete has remained a steadfast resource about the growing collection of Maldives resorts. But we keep visiting (reaching the 20 visit mark this summer), expanding our resort coverage (116 resorts now visited), and adding to the enormous trove of photos and data about the resorts.

The functionality of the site has remained largely constant for the past few years. Explorations into new content, like the Snorkel Spotter, and Instagram listicles, were intriguing experiments but didn’t seem to attract that much extra traffic or engagement. The pace of posting has stayed relatively steady a one every three days on average (I plan for every other day, which is generally a good rhythm for this type of material, but often end up skipping days due to scheduling conflicts).

Twitter – or “X” – has pretty much fallen by the wayside with its slow rot. The most active social media for me is Facebook which has steadily grown in Followers (3,600 at last count). TripAdvisor Forum remains a vibrant community where I try to contribute regularly. The profile of the contributors and the nature of the enquiries has changed considerably over the 15 years. When I started, the TA Forum was dominated by discussions (and recommendations) of small, “traditional” (ie. thatched villas), mid-market properties. Now the majority of new constructions have contemporary styling. I would say that 70% of the TA Forum posts were mid-market, 20% were budget, and 10% were premium properties. Today, I would say that 60% is premium, 30% is midmarket and 10% is budget. When I started contributing to the Forum, I was often the only one sharing info on the premium properties, but now I am often one of relative few sharing on the budget ones.

The whole “Guest House” scene has really taken off and I regularly get asked if I am going to add a database and some posts on this segment. Unfortunately, I have too little experience (ie. none) to write about them authoritatively, and there are way too many (836 at last count compared to approximately 170 resorts) to document them comprehensively with my limited resources.

Looking forward to year 16 with a little help from all the followers and supporters out there.

   

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Things I (Still) Haven’t Seen in the Maldives #20

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Havent Seen - acrylic table

Despite a double visit in the past year, the list of things I haven’t seen in the Maldives (yet) continues to compile. At least it is the shortest list I have ever posted which is maybe a sign that the resorts are introducing about everything one could imagine.

1.  Artistic Acrylic Table – We might not have the whole table (see photo table), but our son Chase bought us a gorgeous cutting board by this maker which evokes the Maldives ocean edge every time we every time we serve with it.

2.  Geode Slice Light Table – I highlighted the Maldives aesthetic of blue geodes as #1 in Haven’t Seen Yet #16, but Faithful Counter top have taken them to a new level incorporating a collection of them, AND lit from underneath.


3. Plankton Stars Blue Light Alert – This notion came to me during our recent visit to Sun Siyam Vilu Reef where we were delighted with seeing the “diamonds” of sparkling blue lights washing up on shore as a small bloom of bioluminescent plankton washed ashore. The word spread somewhat haphazardly through the resort and we only stumbled upon it when a bartender informed us. For something this magical, I would propose that a resort have a “blue light” special inspired alert with some blue LEDs they could light up whenever this relatively rare and precious occurrence is spotted.

4. Sound Walk – Another inspiration from our son Chase who studied Sound Art & Design and took us on this “sound walk” in London’s Regent’s Park. The artist had composed various sound art pieces incorporating field recording from the park. When you tuned into the app on your phone, the music morphed into different pieces inspired by your specific location in the park.

5. Water Concerto – DJ’s are so commonplace now. This should be the new ‘wave’ of musical entertainment.

6. Hanging Pilates – With all of the innovative wellness and fitness activities in the Maldives, I’ve seen hanging yoga, and hanging silks as well as several variations on pilates, but I’ve never seen hanging pilates.

7. Spin Tubing – I’ve featured lots of fanciful and thrilling water sports for water zoomies, but have never seen such a carnival-esque contraption as this one.

8. Surf Jetty – At a world-class surf destination like the Maldives, you could laboriously paddle out to your break, or holidaying in luxury, you could just stroll out. Especially with the Maldives’ famously modest sized waves known more for their length than their height. Or this might be a clever means to provide ready access to an especially fine snorkel point that is beyond a wave break.

9. Shark Wearable Blanket – No “Haven’t Seen” post would be complete without the obligatory shark item. Land Shark!

10. Kulhi Boakibaa – Cited in a nifty piece in National Geographic “Five Unmissable Dishes That Define the Maldives”. I’ve seen 3 of them, but Kulhi Boakibaa, not yet.

Havent Seen Yet - Kulhi Boakibaa

11. Kaya – Coconut Jam? I only found about it in Saveur’s article “Meet the Coffee-Shop Staple Serving Up Coconutty Vibes Around the World”.

Havent Seen - coconut jam

12. Fresh Hot Donuts – Such a simple delight that they make them in food trucks at fun fairs. The donuts served at ALL resorts (even the luxury ones) are stodgy, stale and second-rate.  Many must get tossed for being too past their sell-by-dart to put out again.  So why not have a donut station making them fresh (with an array for special toppings…like coconut jam).

   

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