Maldives Complete-ly by the Numbers 3

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Maldives Complete numbers

Maldives Complete’s sexennial…6 years on and even more complete than ever. Well, a 0.1% more complete (from 98.4% last year to 98.5% this year). The challenge is the new resorts coming online. While I am able to track down missing material for some longer standing resorts, new resorts opening presents a whole new slate of things I need to find for a complete profile.

I am once 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 – Despite a surge of newly announced resorts, the number of active resorts has stayed stable with as many resorts going out of commission for refurb as came on line.
  • Room Types – Big surge in .
  • Best of the Maldives – Resort with most Best Of’s Published – One & Only Reethi Rah 30 (2013 = LUX Maldives 30). Resort with most Best Of’s Drafted – Soneva Fushi 69 (2013 = One & Only Reethi Rah 55).
  • Visitors – The top search terms are specific names of resorts (“Kurumba” – especially “day trip to Kurumba” and “Amilla Fushi” top the list), but topical searches have once again risen to the top such as “bed decoration” and “best house reef in the Maldives”.

This year has not seen any particularly significant new features or addtions to the site. I have focused on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for once to make it easier for people to find the website. I get lots of emails of people saying “Thank goodness I finally found your website.” The money at stake for expensive Maldives holidays mean that lots of travel sites invest heavily to appear at the top of search results crowding out smaller sites like Maldives Complete with less money to spend on such techniques. I’ve cleaned up a few fundamentals like proper tagging and the like, but the biggest impact on ranking are inbound links. So if ay fans of the site out there want to help out, if they can arrange any links to MaldivesComplete.com, that would be the most gratefully received contribution. I’ve also cleaned up a few cosmetic details (cross-browser font compatibility especially on Mac browsers has been a headache).

As it happens, I have a number of exciting bigger developments in the works for 2015…

  • Turtle Database collaboration with MarineSavers at Four Seasons.
  • Dive Site Database
  • Snorkel Safari Treasure Hunt (!)
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Best of the Maldives: Barefoot – Northernmost

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Barefoot map

 

Welcome to Barefoot resort who opened this week. Barefoot is a proper resort, but located on inhabited island of Hanimadhoo. It has all of the amenities and infrastructure of a resort, with the exception of serving alcohol (a limitation on inhabited islands). But Barefoot has sorted a solution to that issue by anchoring a “Bar Boat” in the lagoon that guests can go to for their drinks.

Barefoot caters to a number of popular demands. First, it is offering rooms at increasingly hard to find value price range. Furthermore, it is designed from the outset to be “eco-friendly”. Environmental credentials have been a popular consideration in recent years, but have tended to be the domain of the premium resorts.

“The Barefoot Eco Hotel is an ecological touristic structure that follows the Ecotourism principles of

uniting Sustainability and Conservation, involving Local Community within its activities…The Barefoot is located within an almost untouched forest on Hanimadhoo island in the preserved deep North of Maldives. This 4 star Eco Hotel is well connected to Male international airport by numerous daily 45 minutes flights. Due to its luxuriant vegetation and privacy everybody can fall in an untouched nature, living the genuine and natural Maldives with all modern accommodation facilities. A half mile private sandy beach and a turquoise lagoon frame the hotel.”

Hanimadhoo’s 6 45’ latitude makes it the northernmost resort in the Maldives. Despite it being nearly a 1,000 miles north of the southern extreme Gan, the average temperate differs by less than a degree. It is completely virgin territory for Maldive resorts for people looking for untouched landscape and unexplored dive sites.

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Best of the Maldives: Back Area Water Feature – Soneva Fushi

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Soneva Fushi - back area water feature

Conversely, you could bring a little water to your beach villa. Soneva Fushi’s Soneva Villa is beach villa in the front and “water villa” in the back. A number of resort have water features in their back area, but Soneva’s water feature *IS* the back area. With a cascading water down the walls to boot. The three palm trees are like little iconic deserted islands themselves set in the water (one of which features the outdoor shower – see foreground). The water villa for people who don’t want to be on the ocean.

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Best of the Maldives: Water Villa Foliage – Park Hyatt Hadahaa

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Park Hyatt Hadahaa - water villa foliage

The charm of the water villa is to nearly literally immerse you into the signature Maldivian seascape. But you do sacrifice a bit of that complimentary tropical isle landscape of lush foliage. Park Hyatt Hadahaa’s water villas, however, bring a touch of that island paradise onto your own private nook with a mini-garden of dense greenery on the deck. The sizeable planter provides a very softening and natural touch to the otherwise hard edges and surfaces of characteristics of water villas. Reclining on the adjacent settee, I felt that I was on my own personal deserted island.

Frondescential!

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Best of the Maldives: Water Villas for Children – Centara Grand

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Centara Grand water villa children room

When we were growing up, we used to ask my parents, “There is a Fathers Day and a Mothers Day, but when is Children’s Day??” My parents always used to answer (disappointingly to us), “Every day is Childrens Day.” Well, there is finally a Childrens Day today. Universal Children’s Day, established to promote the welfare and well being of children around the world.

When I first started Maldives Complete, my very first inspiration was children. In the nineties, Maldives was known for (a) honeymooning, and (b) diving. But when we visited, we found it a great destination for children.

While the Maldives in general is great for children, one increasingly popular feature has become a bit of a child-challenged ghetto…water villas. The obvious reason is safety. The jetties are typically flat walkways which the occasional stumble can send adults (or even bikes and buggies) over the edge into the water below. There have been rumors, often cited by resorts where children are not allowed in water villas, that it is against Maldivian regulations to allow them, but that is not actually the case.

Given that today is International Children’s Day promoting the welfare of children, understanding the ins and outs of children in the water villas is an important subject.

The water villas are typically located in calm lagoon shallows so a rescue is pretty straightforward. As with bringing a child to a locale surrounded by water, however tranquil that water may be, vigilant attention to the child is always paramount anyway. And many parents are willing to pay the price of this extra diligence and supervision for the benefit of enjoying the distinctive water villa experience as a family.

Every resort is different when it comes to child policies in the water villas. I have been trying to capture most of the various policies in the Room Type Profiles. But the resort which seems to have to mot child-friendly approach is Centara Grand according to TripAdvisor’s Maldives Travel Article “Maldives: Children in the Maldives”…

“Reputed to have the most family friendly villas in the Maldives and also the only resort which allows children in the Over Water Villas (OWV) without the need to sign a disclaimer first, Centara is a popular family choice. The pool is also a major draw.”

TripAdvisor Destination Expert Nefertari2 elaborates…

“The Family Water Villa’s on Centara are children friendly. They have a railing, with vertical slats all the way around the decking which is at least a metre high and there is a gate which you can lock at the top of the stairs which leads to steps down into the lagoon. There is also a gate at the entrance of the Water Villa which is lockable to prevent the children from running straight onto the jetty as lets face it the robes won’t stop them falling. They are the most child friendly water villa’s I have seen in the Maldives.”

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Best of the Maldives: Largest Bathrooms – Nika

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Nika bathroom 

If more is better in the bathroom department, then you don’t get any more bathroom than Nika’s cavernous powder room. More of a “water warehouse” than a “water closet”. The side room with room with toilet is bigger than many resort’s bathrooms. And the bathroom itself is bigger than most villas! It incorporates 3 showers (one rain inside and 2 outside front and back). Even sink is big enough to bath a small child in. It even has its own indoor garden (see photo above) included in the acreage.

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Best of the Maldives: Private Jacuzzi – Huvafenfushi

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Huvafenfushi - CUBE jacuzzi

Huvafenfushi has its own bathing with multiple heads, but of a more reclined style. Its bathroom’s Jacuzzi bath has not one but 4 places to rest one’s head. Head rests on bath tubs are a bit of a pet peeve of mine. The Calgon-take-me-away moments are all about blissful floating and yet invariably your head is uncomfortably pushing on some ceramic-hard surface.

Huvafenfushi take me away!

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Best of the Maldives: Massage Rain Shower– Ayada

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  Ayada - massage shower

  

 

I’m always intrigued by the ever-moving goal posts of scoring luxury. They seem to move the farthest on the playing fields of opulence that is the resorts of the Maldives.

Years ago, a massage shower was the height of bathroom cleansing sophistication. Then, added nozzles and jets provided an extra degree of soaking sumptuousness. Today, the current gold standard for super-premium bathrooms is the ceiling mounted rain shower.

Ayada has taken all of these hedonistic innovations and amalgamated them into the uber-shower. A multi-nozzle rain-drench massage shower! Featured in its select water villas, one can start to understand how Ayada snared the award for “Leading Water Villa Resort” at the World Travel Market this week.

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World Travel Market 2014

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WTM 2014 Katherine Anthony Ayada awards

While Maldives Complete is my virtual world outlet for experiencing a bit of paradise when sequestered in the damp and dank boroughs of Britain, but once a year I get to inject a bit of real-world Maldives into my life. That is the annual World Travel Market where the Maldives Marketing and Public Relations Corporation comes to town with its marquee stand.

I always visit to saw hello to a few MMPRC and resort friends. But this year brought the added bonus of a “meetup” with some of the TripAdvisor Maldives Forum digital comrades. Pictured above is the TA and Maldives veteran Katherine Anthony holding the two awards won by her resort Ayada – “Leading Resort in the Maldives” and “Leading Water Villa Resort in the Maldives” (big congrats “KatfromAyada” and Ayada).

Joining us were Christine Aldridge of No Shoes No News Travel and Amit Patel of Simply Maldives. We all went out for a post-show nosh-and-natter catching up on all things Maldivian. Going around the table for the resorts sharing our perspectives – between us we had visited over 130 resorts (with obviously a lot of overlap). We whipped round sharing our superlatives like which resorts surprised us the most (in a good way) – Gili Lankanfushi, Soneva Fushi, Bathala, KATH, Komandoo.

The big news of WTM was the Thumburi guest house island project. It looks like an inspired initiative to have your cake and eat it too for both guests and Maldives entrepreneurs. It provides an island and infrastructure to reduce the costs of development and required investment so smaller businesses can investi in Maldives tourism. It also provides scale, diversity and competition to provide high-quality, but value-priced properties for the middle market aspiring to enjoy Maldives paradise.

I got to connect with some new resorts – Embudhoo, Equator Village, Summer island, Sun Siyam Iru Fushi, Diamonds Athuruga and Thudufushi, Barefoot, Centara, and Ayada (obviously).

A little virtual sunshine in my week. Maybe not the palm trees and pina coladas, but I still got to bask in wonderful smiles and gregarious warmth endemic to the Maldives at least for a day.

This post has a new category tags to the blog for “WTM” as this is now the 4th instalment of Maldives presence here.

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