Best of the Maldives: Power Snorkelling – Keyodhoo

Keyodhoo Power Snorkeling

I don’t do Guest Houses, but I do do Snorkeling.

I’ve shied away from adding the new Guest Houses in the Maldives to the Maldives Complete database for a few reasons. First, I’ve neverstayed in one so I have no real first-hand experience to understand the key characteristics to profile. Second, there is less information on them on the web for me to research. They are often small mom-and-pop operations and comprehensive websites are not often provided.

But I have been a big advocate of Maldives being the best place to Snorkel in the world. And from that perspective (and in the spirit of ‘Best of the Maldives’ distinctives and uniques) I just had to add a post about the Keyodhoo guest house’s new ‘Power Snorkeling’ activity

“Power Snorkeling – Only available at Keyodhoo. If you like snorkelling, you’ll just love Power Diving! With Power Dive’s free-floating Power Snorkel, you can dive to 6 metres with a friend for more than an hour on the 35 a/h battery. There are no tanks to carry, wear or refill and, after your dive, simply recharge or exchange the battery and do it all again! You don’t need a dive ticket to use it. View video in sidebar. $35 per couple, or $20 per person.”

Best of the Maldives: Lowest Population Density – Soneva Fushi

Soneva Fushi Island

Not a person in sight.

What most of the prospective visitors on Forums ask about is the lowest population density. Perhaps burnt by crowded beaches and resorts elsewhere in the world, they are drawn to the Maldives by the tranquil seclusion. Relative to these other sardine seasides, even the highest density Maldive islands we have visited always seem sparse by comparison. Seeing fellow guests on the beach and around the island is always a bit of a rare event. I often ask ‘where is everybody’.

But if you want the ultimate in Robinson Crusoe human isolation, then Soneva Fushi is the expanse for you. Unlike most resort profile pictures, the pervasive natural landscape is evident from its aerial shot (see above). Mathematically, Soneva has 65 rooms on a 688,500 square meter island which is an agoraphilic 10,592 square metres per room. Perhaps not surprisingly, the ‘Population Density’ filter was suggested by a friend (Mark Richardson) who happens to be a Soneva Fushi devotee.

In my ‘best of’ filtering, I’ve excluded resorts that are not on their own island (eg. Equator Village on Gan, Traders Hotel on Male) because even though the ‘rooms per hectarage’ is small, there is lots of other infrastructure and ‘residents’.

To be low in density, the trick is to (a) be rather large in size (the numerator in the equation), (b) not have water villas (which add rooms beyond the land area). So for some who prefer the smaller more intimate islands and the luxury of a water villa, a low density is not a big appeal.

And if that density is still too crowded for you, Soneva has their distinctive picnic island (see below) where the density drops right down to nada.

Soneva Fushi picnic island

Best of the Maldives: Highest Population Density – Safari Island

Safari Island Island

 

One trick to SEO is ‘keyword density’, ie. packing each page with the words ‘Maldives Resort’ every where. I didn’t think you folks would appreciate such gratuitous, self-serving clutter so I’ve avoided such contrived measures.

One trick to ‘Population Density’ (ie. rooms per square metre of island) on a Maldives Resort is lots of water villas. And the new leader is the new kid on the block. Safari Island now wins hands down in the ‘Population Density’ stakes. Maldives Complete has all the population densities of all the resorts. The previous king of cozy was Jumeirah Vittaveli with 91 rooms on 14,000 sqm for 154 sqm per room. Safari has 84 rooms on 8,000 sqm for 95 (!) sqm of island per room. Another relative newcomer has also opted for the jam them in approach, Centara Ras Fushi (140 rooms on 29,000 sqm for 215 sqm per room).

But on the horizon is a resort that Dutch Docklands is building whole resorts in lagoons with no island at all. Mathematically, a population density of infinity (that’s what you get when you divide by zero). Actually, the other Maldivian Jumeirah, Dhevanafushi, already sort of has an ‘all water villa’ feature with its complete detatched ‘Ocean Pearls’ villas set out in the middle of the ocean (see below), and Gili Lankanfushi pioneered the boat-only water villas with its collection of residences.

 

Sakis Jumeirah Ocean Pearls

Help Me Help Others

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.

Best of the Maldives: Employees Choice Employer – W Retreat

Maldives Resort Workers top employers study

“W” is for “Worker” on today’s International Worker Day. And in the Maldives,”W” – as in ‘W Retreat’ – is for workers too. According to the definitive source, the Maldives Resort Workers themselves…

“MRW congratulates W Maldives for being the best employer in 2012 and urge other resorts to make a fair attempt to get the title of the best employer in 2013. For most of the resorts, it’s just a matter of coming clean through accounts to give a fair distribution of service charge to the staff, which is by law entitled to staff.”

This ‘Best of the Maldives’ accolade was actually already awarded to W Retreat back when Maldives Complete first started in 2009. But this updated and comprehensive survey provides both quantitative validation and fresh recognition for W Retreat’s enduring focus on this area.

Today’s post has also prompted the addition of yet another Category tag for the site – ‘Management’ (which is actually a bit of a pet subject for me).

Best of the Maldives: Astronomy Week – Gangehi

Gangehi astro milliionaro

 

 

 

 

Most of the special events in the Maldives take one down into the water (like Six Sense Laamu’s Water Wo/Men event). But equally as sparkling as the turquoise lagoons and shimmering reefs is the firmament of stars above. Usually at least once during our Maldives visits, we lie down on the warm sand after dinner to gaze at the night sky packed with stars with a flourish of Milky Way across the middle.

Resorts are catching on to this night time showpiece with increasing numbers offering telescopes, beach star gazing sessions, eclipses, observatories and special events. In fact, today’s post has prompted me to add a new category tag – ‘Astronomy’.

Gangehi is going a step further with an entire ‘Astronomy Week’ devoted to celestial celebration. The line-up includes…

  • Stargazing
  • “Astro-millionaire” game
  • Brief after-dinner astronomy talks
  • Let’s take a shoot to the moon
  • Astronomy walks

As it happens, tomorrow we enter the ‘Lagu’ period of the ‘Seed Moon’ which is Celtic for ‘Flowing Water’ (!). The Runic Calendar of Nordic traditions, which is governed by half months rather than full months, divides this moon of the year by Man (Human) from April 14th through April 28th, and Lagu from April 29th through May 13th.

If you are interested in marking other big astronomical events in your diary, then check out this handy reference chart for 2013 of "13 Must See Star Gazing Events in 2013".

Star attraction!

 

Best of the Maldives: Twitchers – Sun Island

Sun Island bird sanctuary

Another sanctuary for the airbourne is Sun Island’s Kovelivaa park, the biggest bird sanctuary among the Maldives resorts.

As it happens, today is Audubon Day established on the birthdate of the world’s leading ornithological illustrator, John James Audubon. Sometimes, Audubon Day (celebrating wild fowl) and Arbor Day (celebrating wild foliage) are celebrated together by planting trees in bird sanctuaries like Sun’s.

There is more to the Maldives fowl than herons (it seems as it every resort has its resident heron who combines stalking the lagoon shallows for fish with posing like a fethered statue for hours on end to charm the guests). Two lesser seen examples of Maldive bird life found on Sun Island are described below by the resort…

Sun Island White Breasted Waterhen

White Breasted Waterhen (Amaurornis phoenicurus) – “These white breasted waterhens are very calm and like to go along doing their work silently, unnoticed. As the name suggests, these birds are the water counterparts of normal hens and can be seen mostly near edges of water bodies. In [Sun Island’s] IIT, the best places to see them are the lake behind SAC and IITG lake. When no one is around, they are bold enough to venture on the roads, so watch out for them! Local names: Assamese”

Sun Island Asian Koel

Asian Koel (Eudynamys scolopacea) – “Asian Koel is a large cuckoo which feeds mainly on fruits and berries in trees, feasting on the ripe fruits. It also consumes insects and caterpillars. Adults often frequent orchards.”

Megatick!

 

Best of Maldives: Airport Terminal – Shangri-La Villingili

Shangri-La Villingili Gan airport terminal

One of the best ways to see the otherworldly images of the Maldives is by taking a seaplane transfer to your resort. In the beginning, such transfers were cumbersome affairs where you sat in a sweaty, open-air hangar. But now, most of the 5-stars have developed their own swanky lounges at Male airport for seaplane transfers with cappuccino, tropical juices and other amenities. Shangri-La Villingili have gone one step further building an entire dedicated terminal…

“’The terminal, at Gan International Airport in Addu Atoll, is a five-minute speedboat ride to the resort and is for the exclusive arrival and departure of the resort’s guests. A private lounge offers one-stop immigration, custom and baggage screening services. ‘With Gan airport, we have found the ideal partner to provide guests arriving by private jet a unique experience, unmatched convenience and privacy,’ said Rene D. Egle, the resort’s general manager. Guests taking advantage of the new private jet terminal also can try the resort’s ‘Private Jet Experience,’ which features a stay in a 10,000-square-foot presidential villa with a butler and daily massage. Those who fly by private jet can now land five minutes from paradise. Shangri-La’s Villingili Resort and Spa is the first five-star resort in the Maldives to open its own private executive airport terminal.”

Best of Maldives – Online: Interactive Map – Dreaming of Maldives

Dreaming of Maldives interactive map

Like the resurgent corals, the vibrant inter-web thingy just gets richer and more colourful every day. When I launched Maldives Complete, there was a really dearth of good, useful information about the resorts. The resorts themselves had weak and limited websites. Nowadays, things are much more sophisticated.

Probably my second favourite Maldives website, after Maldives Complete, is Sakis Papadopolous’ ‘Dreaming of Maldives’. Just as I started with an anchor of a comprehensive database, Sakis’ starts with simply the best collection of images on the Maldives around. But like Maldives Complete, he hasn’t rested there and has branched into a range of other areas. His section on families, “The child-friendly Resorts in Maldives, all the Kids-clubs,’ remains one of the most comprehensive reviews of resorts on the Maldives. He has started to move into videos with dazzling results. And his latest innovative addition is this ’Maldives Photo Map’.

When I first launched Maldives Complete, one of the fun bits I added was the DeepZoom control of the British Admiralty Maps of the country. As I launched it, you can zoom into the charts to exacting detail. I had fantasized about pushing this party trick even further. I had pictures for both aerial shots of the island and prominent features like the swimming pool. I had thought that once one zoomed into an island, you would see an aerial photo (see directly below). And if you zoomed in on the photo, then it would take you to a shot of the pool (see bottom). A bit like a Russian doll photographic drill down reminiscent of the second half of the iconic film, ‘Powers of Ten’.

In the end, I didn’t see a lot of traffic on my interactive map and Microsoft never really developed the Deep Zoom technology much. Its editing tool, Deep Zoom Composer, remained klunky and incomplete. So I decided it would be too much work to add these extra layers of images. Also, soon the Google and Bings maps caught up on the imagery and so the aerial shots were pretty good. And now Sakis has taken the final step of allowing you to zoom even closer into gorgeous shots of island highlights.

Velassaru deep zoom island

Velassaru deep zoom pool

Pol-ypdate

Four Seasons Kuda Huraa reefscapers frame KH0327

They grow up so fast.

The Four Seasons have always had a website that allowed you to look up your Reefscaper coral frame and see how it was progressing, but now they have just relaunched a special website, Marine Savers, to provide not only frame update lookups, but also detailed information and updates on the ever broading range of their Maldives-leading conservation initiatives.

Above is our frame (KH0327) we planted in November 2010 at Four Seasons Kuda Huraa. Toddler-sized growths are looking pretty attractive compared to the collection of broken pieces that we affixed to the iron frame. Curiously, our frame (LG0729) planted during our visit to Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru that same week is doing notably less well, but still clear healthy growth from the fragments first affixed.

Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru reefscapers frame LG0729