Complete Update

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Best Of list hover tooltip

The number one objective for Maldives Complete has always been “completeness”, but the number two has always been ease of use. Providing the easiest route to the information people need has been the design point which is why I have shunned advertisements, sponsorship and other non-essential dross that clutters so many resort and travel pages. In recent days, I’ve finally finished off the bulk of enhancements that have been on my wish list since my summer tour.

My Maldives tours not only inspire ‘Best Of’ pieces and help complete the profiles with data and pictures, but they also percolate ideas for new features and enhancements to the site. I meet with lots of site fans and industry folks and they provide lots of great ideas of how I might be able to improve it further. Of course, digesting all of the research as well as doing my day job means that these ideas don’t get done over night, but over the past few months, I have implemented a good number of changes that germinated about of Tour 4…

  • Best Of – 2 new pages with added drop down menu…
    • Activity – eg. Sport, Kids, Culture
    • Infrastructure – eg. Lodging, Pool, Decoration
    • Service – eg. Dining, Drink, Greeting
    • Ambience – eg. Nationality, Spa, Ocean
    • Commercial – eg. Pricing, Shopping, Online
  • ·Room Type – A flurry of research to update and complete more of the field
  • Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – Still people struggle to find the site and so I am spending a bit more time making the site search engine friendly (if you are a fan of the site, the one thing you can do to help – and others – is to provide a link to the site from any websites you have…thanks).
    • Better descriptions
    • Better titles
    • Better metatags
  • Profile – I’ve added a couple more pieces to each profile
  • Best Ofs – changed list to “Tooltip” popup to accommodate some of the extra long lists
  • Activities
    • Surfing
    • Marine Biologist
    • Hotelier Group
    • Walkway Rating – ie.  Soft, Hard, Paved
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More Why I Do It

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Scott Adams - aquiring skills

One of my most frequent questions abourt Maldives Complete is still “Why do it do it?” In my previous post in response, I cited Scott Adams’ own answer to the question of the “non-zero chance” for some big serendipity. Scott recently published a new book titled “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life” that delves more deeply into his personal life philosophy. As a part of the release, he has been doing the book promo circuit and his interview with Forbes really hit home for me as another reason behind my compulsive researching and posting…

“For years people have been asking me why I blog. At one point, blogging was taking about half of my work time while providing only 5% of my income. My wife and my friends asked ‘What is your goal in blogging?’ I don’t do goals. I do systems. (That’s a theme of the book.) In this case, my system involved publicly experimenting with a variety of writing styles and topics and closely monitoring the reactions of readers. I was honing my writing skills and my understanding of the reading public. I didn’t have a specific goal. I was aiming for ‘better.’ I reasoned that my system would generate good opportunities for me in ways I couldn’t predict with any precision. That’s what makes it a system and not a goal. I was simply improving my odds that something good would happen. I just didn’t know when it might happen or in what form it would come. Blogging also charges me up. I like the interaction, the angry villagers with torches and pitchforks, and the possibility of saying something useful. It is one part of my overall system for keeping my personal energy high. It also keeps my mind sharp. Several years into my system, it seems to be working.”

Webmastering Maldives Complete is part of my own “system” to keep learning, make new friends and relationships, understand new technologies (eg. Deepzoom, Silverlight), grapple with new media (eg. social media like Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor), and to constantly hone my ability to research, distil and share insights.

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Maldives Complete-ly by the Numbers 2

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2013 Anniversary numbers

Maldives Complete’s semidecennial. 5 years on and more complete than ever.

I am again marking the milestone in true business review fashion with a look at a Harpers Index sampling of stats which tell its progress…

  • Resort Numbers – The array of options steadily climbs with another 4 more resorts announced, but a full 12 additional resort newly operational.
  • Room Types – Being a new feature last year, this area has grown the most (363 new profile photos and 6.2% gain in completion rate).
  • Best of the Maldives – Resort with most Best Of’s Published – LUX Maldives 30 (2012 = W Retreat 21). Resort with most Best Of’s Drafted – One & Only Reethi Rah 55 (2012 = LUX Maldives 31).
  • Visitors – More of the top search terms are specific names of resorts (“Kuramathi” and “Bathala” top the list) pushing down last year’s top terms – “maldives water temperature” and “whale shark”. But the latter remained them most popular post – “Whale Sharks – LUX* Maldives” being the first Maldives Complete post to top 100,000 views.
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Failure in Paradise

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404 page

Yesterday was the 8th anniversary of my first blog which sort of started it all. On the topics of “Leadership and Management” and “Embracing Failure” (both linked by the shared theme of risk attitudes), it pre-dated my Maldives Complete launch by just over 3 years and helped me to get a handle on the medium before immersing it with Maldives material.

One of the messages to “Embracing Failure” is about not avoiding problems, but looking at them as opportunities. One example that I have written about it creative twists on “404 Pages”, aka error pages on websites. Usually, one gets a pedestrian message like this – “The URL contains a typographical error. A custom filter or module, such as URLScan, restricts access to the file. Things you can try: Create the content on the Web server, etc…”).

But website owners are able to set an alternative default page to display when errors are hit. I thought it would be a great opportunity to showcase yet another Sakis master shot and provide a bit more of an topical if not tropical message.

I hope I can keep Maldives Complete running so smoothly that you never hit the 404 page, so I thought I would share it here (also, wait a second with the speakers on).

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Expensive Hobby

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Gapingvoid Expensive Hobby

I still get asked ‘Why do I do it?’ And even with my 9 answers enumerated previously, this trip made me realise even more…

    • Adventure – I realised that my trip was more of an ‘Adventure holiday’ of discovery than an idyllic holiday of chilling out (which is a bit counter intuitive given the Maldives’ fame for ultimate in relaxation). Asking why I do it is similar to asking why a mountain biker spends his holiday toiling over rugged terrain, or why a camper sleeps on cold hard ground or why an athlete goes to a boot camp. To many, the work and effort seems less vacation-like. To me, it’s part of the allure.
    • Digital Vision – I’ve been focused on the Internet and its technology since the 90s when Microsoft “turned on a dime” to embrace it. It is a central part of my professional career, interests and expertise. I have my own interpretations and vision of the trajectories and issues in the still emerging digital world. And Maldives Complete is both my expression and experimentation in that domain. One dimension of a dynamic that intrigues me is the cataloguing of information. The conventional wisdom is that brute-force search engines are the end-all and be-al of information access, but I think the Internet world supports and calls for more models than this as the Google Search has a huge number of shortcomings and gaps. Search is not a Filter. It is a perspective touched on by Internet maven Seth Godin in his post “Sort & Search”…
      • “Search is powerful, essential and lucrative. Google demonstrated just how much value can be created when you let people easily find what they want. Sort, on the other hand, is easily overlooked and something that most of us can can work with. For example, the way a restaurant sorts the wines on the wine list at will have a dramatic impact on what people order. If you list the cheap wines first, people will probably end up spending less. And when your wine list migrates to an iPad and you let the diner sort by price, popularity and other indicators, consumption patterns will instantly change. Hotels.com, Zagats, Kayak and hundreds of other sites let you sort by quality, ranking and price. Not only does this change the way we choose, it also changes the behavior of the those being ranked!”
    • Fun. Earlier this year, my friend and prominent Internet artist Hugh MacLeod published this piece (see above) and it captured another reason. Working on Maldives Complete is fun. It might be an ‘expensive hobby’…but the alternative is even more expensive.

I get a number of typical reactions to the these explanations and friend and artist Hugh MacLeod captured some very apropos replies to these reactions (see cartoons above and below). The first reaction I get to my calling Maldives Complete my “hobby” is that “It’s an awfully expensive hobby.” Well, yes, it is expensive…but most hobbies are. Golf, scuba diving, horse riding, restoring old cars, following Springsteen. As Lori says, I am a “Resort Spotter”. Like a “Trainspotter” obsessed with research, finding and seeing every resort and every unique resort feature (and she is much happier being dragged across the Maldives than to obscure railway depots).

A second reaction is that I must be very “talented” to do the coding and writing I do. Quite frankly, the web page coding is not much more sophisticated that one could do after a basic course on HTML and ASP.net. The design is very simple and many have criticized. And the writing is well…more from the heart than from the trained hand. The key to the success of Maldives Complete has been its “completeness”. Keeping all of the data fresh, up-to-date and accurate. That doesn’t take any special skill or talent, just drive to get it right.

Gapingvoid Creativity Drive

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Help Me Help Others

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Maldives Complete - google

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.

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Best of the Maldives: New Music Tag

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Dreaming of Maldives music

Music.  It’s been a while since I’ve added a new category to the ‘Best of the Maldives’ features.  But yesterday’s Tibetan Singing Bowls inspired me to add ‘Music’.  We have several now mostly falling under the ‘Entertainment’ category.  But, for those audiophiles out there, I thought I now had critical mass to merit its own tag. Here are the pieces to date…

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Maldives Completely by the Numbers

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Tagxedo Maldives Complete small

Happy 4th Anniversary Maldives Complete!

To celebrate the occasion, I’ve created a Tagxedo (see above) based on the 696 A4 pages of blog post material over that quadrennium. Also, I’ve done a bit of a more quantitative tally of Maldives Complete compiled Harper Index style…

Database

  • # Resorts in database – 129
  • # active Resorts – 99
  • # Room Types – 479
  • # Snorkel Spottings – 80
  • Resort with most Spottings – Gili Lankanfushi (20)
  • # resort Profile photos – 1,235
  • # resort Room Type photos – 1,244
  • Total # Resort profile items – 3,640
  • % complete on Resort profiles – 97.6%
  • % complete on Room Profiles – 42.0%

Blog

  • # posts – 553
  • # ‘Best of the Maldives’ posts (visited) – 267
  • # ‘Best of the Maldives’ posts (unvisited) – 140
  • # ‘Best of the Maldives’ post draft (for future publication) – 161
  • Resort with most Best Of’s posted – W Retreat (21)
  • Resort with most Best Of’s posted and drafted – LUX* Maldives (31)
  • Most popular post – “Whale Sharks – LUX* Maldives” (45,975 views)

Visitors

  • Most popular search terms – “maldives water temperature”, “whale shark”
  • # total visits – 4,896,827

Community

  • # Visits to Maldives – 9
  • # dives in the Maldives – 20
  • # Facebook friends – 190
  • # TripAdvisor Maldives Forum Contributions – 952
  • # Resorts visited – 28
  • # Twitter Followers – 44
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Resort / Room Approximate Cost Explanation

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“What’s your budget?”

That is the very first question I or the TripAdvisor Maldives Forum will ask of anyone looking for advice on which of the 120+ resorts to book. And be careful about saying ‘money is no object’ because in the Maldives, the top rooms top out at over $10,000 *per night*.

So when I built the Maldives Complete database that would allow people to filter on the key variables for them, I had to include ‘Cost’ as one of the top variables. The challenge in the whole site is keeping it ‘complete’ (ie. data for as many islands as possible). A clean, consistent, ideal definition of cost would be great, but would be a nightmare to get and maintain for all resorts. In fact, it is this difficulty of getting such information broadly across the resorts that inspired me to build the site in the first place. So I had to choose a definition of ‘Cost’ that was useful and relevant as well as available.

On the Finder page, the ‘Approximate Cost’ is defined as ‘£ GBP for half board and transfers for 7 day stay’. And on the Profile page it is described as ‘UK Feb 15 Cost (GBP £)’. So what exactly does this mean? And why did I choose this measure? That was the question posed by ‘Froggy’ in the recent Trip Advisor Forum post ‘New categories for Complete Maldives’.

The cost is composed of a few assumptions…

  • Duration – I found that most people thought about the costs of going to the Maldives in terms of the cost for a week. Most tour operators quoted their packages as such. So the cost is for 7 days which people seemed to both relate to and the data was readily available for (for starters, I used tour operator catalogues for research).
  • Half Board and Transfers – These considerations are meant to include the ‘whole’ cost of the holiday at the cheapest one could achieve. You have to include transfers because resorts that have a seaplane ride will be a few hundred dollars more expensive for that transfer. Half Board seemed like the reasonable minimum Board costs. Our family did Half Board our first few times when our budgets were tight. We ate huge buffet breakfasts late in the morning, skipped lunch, and then had a filling meal again at the resort buffet which is, again, all-you-can-eat. As a result, I could only get Full Board or All Inclusive rates for some resorts and I had to make an ‘adjustment’ allowing for the extra food and amenities at these rates. If I could determine the supplement cost for these Board levels, then I would simply deduct that amount. If an explicit amount was not published, I estimated £50 per day for Full Board and £100 per day for AI.
  • Lowest Room Category – The price researched was for the cheapest room category available. Again, I wanted people to be able to answer the question ‘what would it take’ to stay at this resort.
  • Feb 15 – The price of Maldive resorts varies quite dramatically across different high and low seasons. I chose mid-February as a semi-arbitrary compare point for several reasons…
    • High Season – I wanted a High Season rate so that people didn’t see a Low Season rate, think they could afford the resort, and then find the price for their time was much higher. High Seasons rates are also more consistent. Resorts typically sell-out at full price in High Season. On Low Season, people can find all sorts of bargains at all sorts of prices if resorts are trying to move unsold inventory. As a result, pegging a representive price point for Low Season is a lot harder.
    • Not a Holiday – ‘Xarla’ correctly pointed out on TripAdvisor that the very top prices are typically during Christmas/New-Year and Easter holidays. But the former typically includes special meals and entertainments, and the latter moves around from year to year. So February seemed a safe and consistent time where the prices would be most uniform.
    • From UK (and GBP pricing) – The packages differ by country because (a) different offers are available to different markets, and (b) airfare differs. I chose the UK because I was from the UK. The UK was the biggest source of guests back when I started researching. While the absolute cost might differ in other countries, the numbers should still provide a good relative comparison between the resorts.

Curiously, when I recently added the ‘Room Type’ Profiles, I adopted a slightly different definition for ‘Cost’ primarily because the type of information that you get on an individual Room Type differs from that available for Resorts overall. I had to make a few modifications to the ‘Approximate Cost’ listed…

  • US Dollars – The biggest source of information on individual room rate (especially these days) are the Room Quote capabilities and published rack rate listed on the resorts’ websites. These are always listed in US Dollars.
  • Bed & Breakfast – Looking at an individual room, it seemed to make more sense to just talk about the room price typically referred to at ‘B&B’ (Bed & Breakfast) or ‘RB’ (Room and Breakfast). Every resort includes breakfast as a part of the most basic rate. Again, if FB or AI rates were all I could find, I adjusted them as noted above.
  • One Night – While the ‘Resort Cost’ was listed per week, I listed the ‘Room Cost’ per night. It is just my assessment that people think of Resort costs per week and Room costs per night for comparison purposes.
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What Else I Don’t Write About

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Maldives palm tree

With all the talk of what I’ve seen and haven’t, one might be musing over the glaring absence of a number of topics that seem to pervade so many other Maldives web sites…

  • Classic Maldives – I’ll leave the carbon-copy effluvia about how glowing the sunets are, how blue the water is, peaceful the quiet it, how remote the isolation is, how fragrant the blossoms are, how attentive the service is to the professional hacks.
  • General quality issues (food, service, rooms). I’m only interested in distinctive things that stand out. I’m not interested in Michael Winner dissections of the tenderness of the lamb loin.
  • Awards – The whole industry award scheme is so skewed by graft (awards going to big advertisers) and bogus methodologies (voting schemes by skewed samples and populations) I tend to steer clear. When I first started out, a few awards caught my eye, but now I have completely forsaken them out of frustration.
  • Politics and Country – I don’t write about the politics. I don’t pretend to have any first hand perspective or knowledge. It is a topical subject at the moment and even impinges on the tourism industry, but not a matter I feel any authority to comment on.
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