For all the budding young Gladiators looking to burn all the excess energy of from the excitement of arriving in paradise, Emerald’s Dolphin Kids Club offers a fun obstacle course to scamper through for hours on end so when Mom and Dad pick them up they are all spent and ready to sit calmly during cocktail hour.
The underwater, well, everything in the Maldives is so amazing that every visit should feature as much of it as possible. I love underwater facilities, but I especially like when the resorts expand their use to for other things so as many people can enjoy the underwater experience as possible. OBLU Ailafushi and OBLU Lobigili are using their underwater restaurants as a marine classroom. And part of their coral-life curriculum is a fun treasure hunt for different species of marine life. And the activity is not just for guests, but the properties also invite local Maldivian school children over to enjoy and benefit from this unique classroom experience.
Two of my favourite things to enjoy in the Maldives – underwater and treasure hunts!
If you want to make your own song or if the music of the ocean breeze in the palm trees and the gentle rhythm of seawater lapping the linen white sand inspires your compositional creativity, Cora Cora offers guitar lessons for their guests by resident Mani. In fact, even their staff have taken part including Sam featured here in this sample duet of some cord progressions.
Birds are the most prominent above-water creatures in the Maldives and Patina has segregated its own over-water sanctuary for these feathered friends. A review from Luxury Traveler describes:
Some spas are on the island and some spas are overwater, but at Kuda Villingili the spas have their own very own island complete with overwater treatment rooms.
Soneva Jani doesn’t do anything by halves and that includes its spa yoga pavilion which is not only the highest in the Maldives, but also the largest we have seen. You can escape from the escape perched high above resort life below while still immersed in the beauty of paradise surrounding you with a 360 degree panoramic view.
A strong spine is literally the backbone of healthy living. My interest is in sport and I am always struck by how (literally) central the importance of posture was for so many activities. I heard our ballroom dance teacher giving me the exact same tips about “shoulders down and back, pelvis forward, back straight”, that I gave my rowing students. Of course, back pain seems to be the most common affliction of aging which again all boils down to the spine. Ritz Carlton Maldives hosted Lorelei “Yoyi” Bulan who is a spine health expert during our stay. She walked me through a number of demonstrations and exercises (see videos) to gently activate, limber and strengthen my spine. Relieving stress discomfort at the literal “core”.
When we first started coming to the Maldives in the 1990s, most resorts didn’t have spas. A few 5-star properties we stay at had a therapist on staff who could do a treatment by appointment often in some jury-rigged, tucked away part of the island. But now, spas are don’t just offer relaxing massages, but rather an array of treatments as extensive as a typical breakfast buffet. And to help navigate this bewildering set of options at Waldorf Astoria Ithaafushi is the Maldives first “wellness concierge”:
When I first started Maldives Complete (2009), many resorts barely had websites. When I mentioned that mine had a “blog”, most people asked “what’s that?” TripAdvisor was still in its nascent stages with the beginnings of crowd-sourced content with reviews and chat forums. Many people came to Maldives Complete because there simply weren’t many alternatives. The majority of destination research was done through paper travel brochures provided by operators and agents (which was a big source of material at the outset of the website).
As the web presence grew (as well as the number of resorts), the website was visited more for its comprehensiveness of practical information as well as ease of use in an increasingly cluttered digital landscape. The most recent stage of online evolution has been social media which has flooded the web with both casual crowd sourced material as well as more “professional” content that has shifted the online dynamics again (especially in crowding out Maldives Complete discoverability into the cut-throat search space with big budget SEO muscling to the top – fortunately, operators and agents remain long-standing, active and enthusiastic supporters of the site).
We are now standing at the dawn on the next major transformation in how online users get information from the web – AI. You’d be hard pressed to have missed the stories written (hopefully by humans) on the heels of the landmark release of ChatGPT. Perhaps Sam Harris’ podcast this week with Paul Bloom described the current developments best saying, “In one of our conversations a couple of years ago, if you’d asked when will we have a system capable of having a perfectly normal conversation saying intelligent things, I’d say, ‘I don’t know…20 years? 50 years? Maybe never.’ And yet here we are.”
I have been playing around with OpenAI and ChatGPT for a few weeks now, and I must say that I am truly gobsmacked by what it can do. It is not perfect, but that doesn’t matter. The same is true in the early days of any technology. It’s the “dancing bear” metaphor…it’s not that the bear dances like the Bolshoi, it’s just amazing that the bear dances at all.
Amidst all of the experimentation and commentary about ChatGPT, the consensus is that the dancing bear’s most nimble party piece is answering complex but fairly specific questions with information drawn from the Internet. So, I thought I would pit the engine against my Mastermind specialty subject – Maldives resort recommendations.
The three most common types of questions asked about Maldives resorts are the following:
I went to TripAdvisor Forum to get several IRL examples of such queries and see how ChatGPT performed. The results are below. And those results echo what most commentators are saying about the AI – B+ results. They aren’t prefect but, (a) they are darn good, and (b) they seem human-like (nb. Turing Test). In my decade plus of contributing to the TripAdvisor Forum about the Maldives, I would place these responses as certainly par for the vast majority of human contributions and better than many of them. This technology is inflecting so watch this space!
