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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Room Types Launched

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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.

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Best of the Maldives: Towel Scuplture – Club Med Kani

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Club Med Kani towel sculpture

Pin it!

I was inspired by the terry cloth creature above to take the plunge into the latest social media – Pinterest. 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.

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Best of the Maldives Online: Videos – Dreaming of Maldives

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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.

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Snorkel Spotter v1.0

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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!

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