Resort / Room Approximate Cost Explanation

“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.

What Else I Don’t Write About

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.

Room Types Launched

Room Type Profile

 How to get more ‘Complete’ when you are 98% complete?

The Maldives Complete set of Profiles are currently 97.4% complete among active resorts. A ‘complete Profile’ is having all of the information and photos in the standard profile. Even when inactive resorts are included, the completion percentage is 93.5%. At that level, it becomes a rare occurrence to find information that we don’t have yet. We don’t want to fill Maldives Complete with useless stuff. There’s too much of that on Maldives websites already. But I think that there is one set of information that is becoming increasing important for prospective visitors and yet extremely hard to come by and compare…Room Types.

When I started coming to the Maldives and even to a degree when I started the site a few years ago, the Resort defined the rooms. Most of the rooms in a given resort were pretty much uniform. There was occasionally a ‘Presidential Suite’ for big spenders and VIPs, as well as the ever increasing number of Water Villas. But aside from those variations, if you chose a resort, you pretty well knew what the room would be like.

Not any more. Not just are the resorts becoming more diverse, but the rooms within each resort are also getting more diverse. So much so that a good number of islands have two distinct classes…one catering to 4-star and one at a 5-star level. Beyond that basic breakdown in standard, all sorts of other variations are being introduced…different sizes, layouts, features (eg. glass floors), pool/Jacuzzi option, etc.

You see the interest and the corresponding confusion on travel forums like TripAdvisor. More and more of the posts are less enquiring about an ideal ‘resort’ and more about an ideal ‘room’. With all of the diversity, a special room in one resort might be the perfect ‘room’ that someone is looking for even though most of the other rooms are not anywhere close.

To help with this new level of complexity, I have added ‘Room Type Finder’ and ‘Room Type Profile’ pages to Maldives Complete. They behave almost identically to the existing ‘Finder’ and ‘Profile’ features.

Many resorts have about a half dozen types of rooms. I’ve already written about Kurumba diversity topping 9 room types (and that doesn’t even include any water villas). But that was a few years ago and now about a dozen resorts offer that many types (or more). On average, about a 100+ resorts (I only include ‘Acrtive’ resorts) with 4-5 room types on average means about 500 or so Profiles. Again, the spirit of the Profile section is to provide a few of the key pieces of information and photos in a consistent manner for easy comparison. With about 10 pieces of core profile information per Room Type, that’s a potential 5,000 piece of information. Even at this early stage of research, we already have over 900+ photos. Nonetheless, of the core profile information, we currently only have 34% Maldives-Complete-ness.

The current pages are still pretty much in ‘Beta’ form. This means that I am sure there will be lots of gaps, mistakes, missing stuff, requested enhancements and even bugs. But best to get the current version out there so it can be whatever use it can be, and people can start to feed back to me with corrections and requests.

I have an number of enhancements already in the works. Information about the restrictions of children in the rooms which is a very key consideration for families interested in water villas where the rules can vary quite a bit about children allowed. Also, I am only about halfway through gathering the room ‘rack rates’ data so people can filter on pricing.

Special thanks to my research assistants Grace and Emma.

Best of the Maldives: Towel Scuplture – Club Med Kani

Club Med Kani towel sculpture

Pin it!

I was inspired by the terry cloth creature above to take the plunge into the latest social mediaPinterest. Pinterest allows you to set up albums to share collections of photos. I’ve already featured room art a number of times including ‘Bed Decoration’ and ‘Bed Art’, but this particular piece (shared with permission from guest Vincent Benita) is by far the most elaborate and cheeky I have ever seen.

The piece made me realise that I regularly come across great examples of bed and room decorations and rather than constantly revising my ‘Best Of’ posts, it would be better to create an honour gallery where al my discoveries could be collected and showcased. I’m started with the following two ‘Boards’…

I was tempted to create a ‘Maldives Sunset’ Board since there are so many prize examples of those on the web, but I’m going to start with these first.

Best of the Maldives Online: Videos – Dreaming of Maldives

Dreamin of the Maldives videos

Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Foursquare…all of this look a social media and I have not yet looked at one of the big ones, YouTube.

As it happens, the best eye to Maldivian spectacle has expanded his lens from photography to videography recently. Sakis Papadolpolous now has a collection of video vignettes for resorts he has produced available not just on his own Dreaming of Maldives site, but also on Vimeo and his own YouTube channel. They are simply the best resort videos going. Sakis does produce some seriously beautiful staged ‘mood’ shots to highlight a languid hammock or a tantalising cocktail. But he also includes plemty of panoramic material which provides a good perspective on the look and feel of the landscape itself and facility itself.

Since the inception, I have included a video of the resort in the main Profile page if there was a decent video available on YouTube. I limited myself to YouTube do to the ease of embedding into the Profile page. I limited myself to’decent’ because I loathe those fake slide-show “videos” (in air quotes) which are just the picture gallery set to music with some tired transitions. Many of my resort clips were guests simply doing a walk through to capture a feel for the resort for their friends or their own memories. Production quality not be much, but their utility and effectiveness to give people an authentic feel for the resort is invaluable.

Video is definitely taking over the web. A decent video of your resort is as much online table-stakes as an FAQ, map of the island and contact details.

I’ve now changed the videos in the Profiles to Sakis’ pieces for the resorts that he has done so far – Six Senses Laamu, Huvafenfushi, Dhonakulhi Island Hideaway and Lily Beach. Hopefully, more resorts will produce such vivid illustrations and hopefully, they will all use Sakis’ artistic talents to do so.

Snorkel Spotter v1.0

Snorkel Spotter

How about an entirely new form of social media designed just for the Maldives?

Introducing ‘Snorkel Spotter’.

Snorkel Spotter is something I have dreamt of for a long time. It was inspired by my experience at Maldives resorts where snorkelling is so popular and the most common question around the bar at night is ‘what did you see today?’ The question is not just marine curiosity and nor merely making conversation, but it is helpful reconnaissance into where one might decide to snorkel on your next outing.

I often suggested that resorts put up white boards at reception with a map of the island where guests could make a public note of what they had seen that day. Since no one took me up on it, I decided to create a virtual whiteboard. Sort of ‘Foursquare for Fish’ as one digerati put it.

If you want to add some sightings, you simply drag and drop the sea creature you saw from the menu at the left to the place around the island where you spotted it (use ‘Starfish’ for ‘all others’ of anything spotted you want to mention that is not included in the standard menu). A small pop-up will show allowing you to make a comment or add (optional) contact information.

If you want to see some spottings, then select Kurumba or W Retreat where I logged some of the sightings my wife and I made during out visit last summer. Also, a beta tester ‘Aurore’ logged a couple of sightings for Sheraton Full Moon and W Retreat as well.

It’s just version 1.0 so it might not be perfect. I have a number of planned enhancements and suspect that once people start using it, other improvements will become evident. Feel free to contact me with any suggestions or problems.

Happy Snorkeling!

Social Sunshine

Facebook and Twitter icons

The web is getting more and more social. My Maldives Complete blog was one of the first dedicated Blogs to Maldives Resorts and now there are a fair number. I’ve already looked at resort website Forums and the grandmaster of all Maldives Forums on TripAdvisor. Now the giants on the block now are Facebook and Twitter.

To keep up with the times and how people get research their resorts, I too have created a Maldives Complete Facebook page and a Twitter feed. The Maldives Complete page is probably the best way to keep track of my contributions to resort’s Facebook pages though mostly I post to the resort when I have written about them in a ‘Best of the Maldives’ piece. I also have started Tweeting, but after and initial flurry I’ve tapered off as Twitter activity on Maldives resorts seems a bit immature and quiet at the moment.

I’ve now also added a field in the profile for both the resort’s Facebook Pages (or in some cases ‘Groups’) and Twitter accounts.

In the process of researching the information for all the resorts Facebook and Twitter information I did a review of all of their presences. The analysis was done at the end of January after which Facebook changed dramatically the ‘Groups’ feature. As a result, a number of the resorts’ ‘Groups’ have been discontinued or else reset from scratch (showing low numbers of members).

In gathering up the various links, I uncovered some curious statistics…

  • Resorts without Facebook pages – 19
  • Average number of Likes/Members – 963
  • Average number of Photos – 216
  • Average number of Comments/Posts (not by resort) – 29 (over one month period)

This week is Social Media week with some special recognitions to the resorts who have best embraced this new connection to Friends and Followers.

System Down

Server Error

 

 

Due to a problem with server configuration at our MaldivesComplete’s hoster, the usual URLs for Maldives Complete are producing error messages to visitors (like the one above), except for the Blog which is all working fine.

For the interim, I have posted up a copy of the site at Maldives.maldivescomplete.com for people to use.

We expect normal service to resume shortly. Please accept our deeply felt apologies for this inconvenience.

Spa, Pools, Bathrooms and Bedrooms

Best Of Activity and Infrastructure

The ‘Best’ keeps getting better. And I’ve had to revamp the ‘Best Of’ page a bit more to accommodate all of the accumulating resort highlights. For starters, I have split the page into two tabbed pages since there are simply so many ‘Best Ofs’ to list. I have broken the groups in ‘Activity’ and ‘Infrastructure’.

While I was making those changes and updating the page, I added a few other breakout tags. I’ve split out the following…

New Tags

Maldives Complete - tags

Reef-frames are the only things with better labels as I have this week updated the ‘Tags’ used on Maldives Complete. Of course, you can always use Google or the Search facility on the blog to search for text like ‘snorkelling’ or ‘surfing’. But, text search will indiscriminately bring up any mention whatsoever of that word. Tags are used by sites to indicate important topics in the post or page. If you select one of the ‘Tags’ at the bottom of the posts (or in the ‘tag cloud’ – see above – which highlight the most prevalent tags scaled to proportion of their use), then it will bring you all the posts that are focused on that subject.

For a long time, I have had a collection of tags corresponding to the various ‘Best of the Maldives’ categories (eg. Sport, Activity, Service, Online). And over time, those have morphed a bit as certain sub-categories grew big enough to merit their own break out (eg. Surfing, Shopping). For starters this week, I have added another breakout to ‘Activity’ which is ‘Boating’.

But I have also added the following Tags which don’t relate to ‘Best Of’ categories, but rather to my other types of posts…

  • Destination – about the Maldives itself in general (eg. weather, family tips)
  • Industry – about tourism in the Maldives (eg. rating system, tourist numbers)
  • Tour – reviews of my days there when I do personal trips
  • Site – about the Maldives Complete site itself like new features (like this post here)
  • Fun – whimsical stuff that just brings a smile to my face.