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!
Cora Cora’s star-gazing tower lends a Swiss Family Robinson natural vibe to getting closer to the stars.
The main event in the Maldives is the ocean view. Bering such a tiny plot of sand in the middle of the vast ocean (or if you are underwater!), the aquatic vistas surround our and consume you. Whenever I am in an area of outstanding natural beauty, I always am bemused by buildings with small windows. Why don’t they make as expansive a window as possible to enjoy such a distinctive sight? One resort that has gotten this right to the extreme, pretty much bringing the entire outdoors right into the bedroom, is Ritz Carlton Maldives. Absolutely the biggest villa “window” on the water that we have seen in the Maldives.
Maldives is defined by its intimacy with the water, and resorts have become renowned for underwater and overwater facilities to put guest as close as possible to this main event. The glass floor has become one of the iconic elements to extend this aquatic vista even further. OZEN Maadhoo starts every visitor off with this perspective featuring a prominent one right on their arrival jetty. One of the first things you do when you arrive in the Maldives (even after two decades, I can attest) is to look down to see the myriad sea life frolicking below as you walk along the arrival jetty, but at Maadhoo this thrilling sight started as soon as we had our welcome drink in hand.
An electric buggy to take you from the arrival jetty to your villa as well as to and from your villa to various parts of the island is standard fare in all but the smallest of islands. But Soneva Jani uses a speedboat “buggy” to take you to your water villa, and it can be summoned to take you from the villa to the central part of the island (with the main restaurant, shops, dive centre, etc.). the transfer is 2 minutes in choppy water and 90 seconds on smooth (we timed it), versus the alternative of a 15 minute buggy transfer over land.
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Happy Easter! If you especially appreciate the traditional flowers of this holiday, then you will be particularly grateful for the floral greeting by Cora Cora’s own mini lei with a tropical flower on a palm leaf necklace to adorn your welcome.
