Best of the Maldives: Luxury (2011) – Cocoa Island

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Trip Advisor Readers Choice Awards 2011

The Trip Advisor Traveller’s Choice Awards have been announced and the top Maldives resort was Cocoa Island, the only one featured in their 10 lists. It came in #5 in the ‘Top Luxury’ resorts worldwide (wresting the title from last year’s honoree Angasana).  A well deserved honour, it would seem, given the very recent report by Francis where he described it as bringing him to tears. Just to top it all off, Cocoa Island also tops Trip Advisor with the highest review ratings of any Maldives resort.

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Best of Maldives Online – Italian: Mondo Maldives

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MondoMaldives

 

Maldives Complete, Seven Holidays and Mondo Maldive. That’s the Maldive aficionado’s list of top online websites about resorts. That’s what the fans say and that’s where I would point people to.

Maldives Complete’s mission was always about being comprehensive. Having all the desired info and pictures (and not a lot of redundant and extraneous bits like pictures of fish and sunsets) has been Maldive Complete’s mission from the outset. The only other website that has a similar degree of completeness if Mondo Maldives. Mondo features 108 resorts (compared to Maldives Complete’s 122 though we include a number of resorts that are offline and being built).

Now Mondo Maldives have taken that thoroughness to the print world. From my very first trip, the definitive book on Maldives resorts was always Adrian Neville’s ‘Resorts of the Maldives’. The book had the largest array of resorts as well as a balanced and candid narrative. On my most recent trip, I spied ‘Mondo Maldives’ – the book in the airport gift shop. Knowing the quality website, I took a look and was super impressed. The book was a true encyclopaedia of information on the resorts (it is advertised on their home page, but it doesn’t appear in their shop when you click on it).

Mondo’s is based in Italy and the whole site is available in Italian with the core parts being available in an English version as well. Unfortunately, its rich ‘Forum’ on its site is all Italian.

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Best of Maldives: Online Authority – Visit Maldives

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Visit Maldives


If you type ‘maldives’ into a search engine, then the prized first top selection that will appear is the www.visitmaldives.com. Visit Maldives (‘The Sunny Side of Life’) is the official site of the Maldives Tourism Promotion Board. It is very comprehensive covering aspects of the country, activities, transport, etc. And now it is even slicker, crisper and more complete with this past week’s long anticipated revamp of the site. It has a few minor glitches which are likely teething pains to be worked out in short order.

MTPB have added some filtering to their resort listing allowing people to narrow their search by budget, distance from airport and number of room. The resort listing is more detailed than it used to be with more pictures and vital stats.

Definitely one of the first online ports of call for anyone investigating a Maldives visit.

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Best of the Maldives: Online Official Resort Mapping – Maldives Department of National Planning

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Department of National Mapping

Maps are a big thing for Maldives Complete. When you have 100+ resorts on a 1,192 islands a map is pretty critical. And the unique topology is one of the things that makes the Maldives a front runner contender for the ‘Seven Natural Wonders of the World’. One of my highlights of any trip to the Maldives is when the airplane finally arrives in Maldives airspace and the dappling of stunning blues start to appear in the ocean below.

Maldives Complete already features both Bing maps and resort maps on each resort profile as well as a unique ‘Deep Zoom’ version of the classic British Admiralty charts. Now, thanks to Francis Negrin once again, I have another to share.

The Maldives Department of Planning has posted its official atoll maps accompanied by an official resort listing on the web. Since Francis highlighted it to me a while back, I have found it extremely useful as the definitive source on resort status, names and geo information.

As Francis commented, “this collection of maps is amazing and the only worthwhile maps of maldives I have ever seen. it shows all the existing resorts with real and current commercial names shown in blue, and also in blue are all the islands set aside for resort development . It makes it easier to then go on google earth to see what the islands are like from above, or search the internet for news about new resorts opening (an otherwise quasi impossible task)… or to see what uninhabited or inhabited islands are near certain resort islands etc. and it is relatively up to date (2009).”

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Best of the Maldives: Online Community – Kuredu

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Kuredu Forum

 

While TripAdvisor is the granddaddy of the general travel community/forums, many resorts are setting up their own online communities on their websites just focused on their resorts. Some of these have scant posts and interactions (and one in particular falls afoul of poor attitude by the administrator), but one resort online community stands out as vibrant, easy to use and friendly – Kuredu.

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Best of Maldives Online: Community – Trip Advisor

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Trip Advisor - Maldives Forum

In my research for various esoteric details about the Maldives resorts, the assortment of online forums are invaluable resources for tapping into the broad and deep expertise out in the world of both visitors sharing their experiences to aficionados who are Mastermind experts on the subject of the Maldives. Most of the prominent travel publications offer forums (eg. Fodors, Frommer, Lonely Planet), but they all absolutely pale in comparison to the grand-master of them all: TripAdvisor.

I track, access and participate in the other forums from time to time and find that they get entries maybe once a week on average. TripAdvisor can get entries every hour just on the Maldives. Moreover, on other forums, your question will often linger unanswered. TripAdvisor posts typically get some sort of response within the day and can trigger dozens of replies for a particularly intriguing subject.

The greatest asset, though, are the ‘Destination Experts’. These are people with a knowledge of the Maldives as deep as their passion for them. The top expert, ActiveGirl, has 3,418 forum posts to her credit. And the other top contributors all have over 1,000 themselves.

In addition, to the unparalleled expertise that is generously shared out, the forum is one of the few that I have been to that truly lives up to the notion of being a ‘community’. A lot of the participants know each other and many of the posts are done with humour and levity and good natured banter.

Helpful Tips – Some of the newbies to the forum jump right in with big, broad questions like ‘I’m going to the Maldives on my honeymoon, where is the best resort?’ Try to focus your questions a bit by giving some of your key concerns, preferences, etc. The more specific and challenging the question, the more assistance the experts can provide. Secondly, if you do have a specific question, given TA’s hoard of over 15,000 posts just on the Maldives, there is a very good chance that someone has already asked it, so use the search facility on the site to see if you can’t find the answer straight away without having to do a post.

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Best of Maldives Online – Photography

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Dreaming of the Maldives

The startling natural beauty of the Maldives has inspired legions of photographers professional and amateur alike. A design choice of MaldivesComplete was to have the iconic imagery of the blues and whites filling the browser page as the background so that visitors would sort of feel immersed in this distinctive locale while you conducted your investigation.

If your holiday snaps don’t quite capture the breathtaking beauty you recall from your visit, then a whole range of online sites offer piles to choose from. In the public sites, like Flickr and Facebook, you can find some truly marvellous images. But if you want a sure fire collection of some of the most dazzling pictures ever captured, the top Maldives photo site has to be ‘Dreaming of Maldives’. Sakis, the photographer behind it, is offering a special deal of free 2010 calendar when you buy his photo book. I bought these recently and they are truly gorgeous (and the pictures in the calendar are different to those in the book).

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Best of Maldives Online – Guide

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SevenHolidays

I’m starting a new category of my ‘Best of’ posts to cover the vast, growing and consummately useful area of Online resources. So not specifically focused on each resort directly, but a great complementary way to find the perfect resort. As stated on the home page and in my very original post, I started the Maldives Complete site out of frustration with the incompleteness and emptiness of most sites on the web about the Maldives. That said, there are some real gems.

The first gem I have to feature is one which launched shortly after Maldives Complete – Seven Holidays. The man behind the site, Adrian Neville, is a legend in chronicling the Maldives resorts. His book, ‘Resorts of the Maldives’, was one of the first and most cherished guide books that I bought on the area. His SevenHolidays is essentially an interactive, digital version of that book. It is distinguished for truly insightful, articulate and professional travel reviews of the resorts. None of these simply effusive, contrived glow-fests one finds littering so many travel and resort sites.

Beyond the core of well written, insightful and balanced editorial, Neville has also invested in a very slick and functional site. In fact, I would say that SevenHolidays is the slickest and smartest looking of the Maldives resort web sites. But some clever functionality and a quite comprehensive set of information is what makes it so useful. The special utility functions include ‘Resort Top Sevens’ (a ‘best of’ selection for a range of criteria like ‘Beaches’, ‘Rooms’, ‘Romance’) and a basic filtering search called ‘Limit By’ which allows people to filter on the two criteria of ‘Price’ and ‘Room Density.’

In fact, a fan of both (thanks Francis) wrote me recently and suggested that if you combined Maldives Complete and Seven Holidays you would have the perfect Maldives site.

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Top Site – Wikipedia Maldives

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A new category of posts I am starting in this blog is ‘Top Sites’ on the Maldives.  There are an enormous number of websites and blogs on the subject of the Maldives, and yet I started Maldives Complete out of frustration with the quality of them all.  I found too many of them either too commercial (they provide a little bit of useful information and lots of material on how to book a holiday), or too repetitive (too many peons to how idyllic this beautiful place is with the same pictures of sea life, turquoise waters and tropical flowers).

All that said, a number of websites do stand out for their usefulness.  The first one to highlight is the Maldives entry into Wikipedia.  The entry maintains the high degree of characteristic objectivity and review covering areas of history, economy, civics and culture.

A particular point of pride for Maldives Complete is that the site is featured in Wikipedia’s ‘External Links’ section which is reserved for only a select few highly useful, non-commercial reference sites.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Satellite Views

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Virtual Earth and Google Earth provide useful and sometimes stunning images from above of the Maldives to provide a sense of where you are heading to.  But often the images are months if not years old.  If you want the uber-birds-eye view, especially to see what the weather is looking like, check out Eumetsat hourly satellite photography online for a peek at the (usually) blue skies awaiting you.  The ‘Southern Asia’ (which covers the Maldives) colour photos are found here.  If you select the ‘Play’ option, then the site goes through the pictures in sequence to provide an animation of the weather movements.

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