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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Leaving a resort is painful enough just saying goodbye to paradise, but often it made worse by having to leave your luxurious room and being homeless for your final hours. Resorts often invest considerably into arrival lounges to make a great first impression and to provide extra care for guests usually coming off tiring long-haul journeys. But less attention is given to the departure infrastructure. Some resorts have a waiting area you can use, but in all too many your only option is to sit in the reception until it is time to go. But Cora Cora has added a departure lounge as luxurious as many arrival ones. It includes recliner chairs (see photo), a special beach area (for easily getting that final dip in the Indian Ocean), shower (to rinse off the salty and sand), as well as an array of refreshments. Putting some “cheer” into “cheerio”.
The Nautilus is the only resort to offer all guests a “CIP” (Commercially Important Person) arrival provide welcoming right at their parked private chartered jet or international commercial flight at Male airport. These guests also get to relax in the VIP lounge while immigration and baggage are organised avoiding the queues at the immigration hall.
After 20+ years of travelling to the Maldives, I’m regularly surprised to find somewhat simple things that I’ve never seen before. The latest was our transfer to SAii Lagoon and Hard Rock on a catamaran speed boat. On one hand, cats are much more stable than mono-hulls, so you would think that they would be a prominent choice to provide the smoothest final leg to your Male atoll resort. But, they are more expensive so I can understand resorts choosing the lower cost vessel. One of their biggest advantages is capacity and for smaller resorts, you often don’t get more than a few folks transferring per arrival so that space is probably not worth it. But SAii Lagoon and Hard Rock (plus day visitors at The Crossroads) is a bigger complex so they can justify the expense carrying the larger boatloads.
The major point of a private jet is to avoid stopovers and transfers and just get directly from point A to point B. With so many of the super-luxury resorts a plane ride away from the main airport in Male, the most affluent look to fly their private jet straight to their island. No resorts have their own private jet runaway, but NIYAMA is a mere 7 minute boat transfer from the newly opened Dhaalu Airport.
Dhaalu Airport can now handle and process long range jets up to 111 feet in length, with ninety-six hours’ notification required to arrange a private international landing and departure, including immigration, customs and legislated health checks and requirements for arriving passengers.
I wouldn’t have included NIYAMA in the list of “super-luxury” properties that most of the private-jet-set would frequenting, but maybe this convenience will boost their appeal.
The latest surf-faring air transfer in the Maldives with a distinctly piscatorial picture scheme is FlyMe’s “yellow tuna” inspired seaplane…
The flying fish in the Maldives are the biggest in the world…
From the high ways of water usage to the water used as highways. Maldives Complete does focus on resorts (as opposed to guest houses or general destination information like inhabited islands), but I am also trying to assemble a collection of top online links for guests to this paradise. One of my original motivations for setting up Maldives Complete was my disenchantment with the quality of websites about the Maldives. Too many sites provides a thin veneer of weak, pedestrian and dated information as a lure to get you to buy expensive holidays through them. But on Maldives Complete, the “Online” tag provides a compilation of the most useful sites.
I came upon this Wild Maldives site with ferry schedules in the Maldives TripAdvisor Forum. They describe themselves as…
What I really appreciated was their interactive ferry schedule. The route calculation form provides a parameter driven filter engine that then displays the route options graphically on a Google Map. Two of my favourite web components – database interrogation and GIS (geographical information system).
I have taken a ferry a few times for some of my more obscure tour detours. For DIY and budget travellers, they would be a necessity for getting around. I’m not sure if there is some way to forge a cheaper price tag to your resort holiday with them. Everyone gets apprehensive about spending $200-300 for a seaplane transfer, but I had a boat transfer to Cocoa Island that cost me $500 (!) and the private transfer from Kurumba to Male (8 minutes) costs $80 (although they do offer cheaper alternatives). So maybe a leisurely and notably less luxurious ferry ride might just be a useful cost saver for some itineraries (though, in reality, nearly all resorts provide speedboat transfers free of charge, and if you are paying thousands for your week stay a few hundred will likely not be a big concern).
All the resorts will offer transfer from the airport to their hotels. And some hotels offer trips to sister resorts. But Club Med provides a regular, scheduled boat shuttle between its Club Med Kani and Club Med Finolhu Villas properties (departing about every 90 minutes from 8:00 am to 11:00 pm on about a 10 minute journey).
The courtesy gives guests the best of both worlds between two quite different properties. All the expansive facilities of the Kani are available free of charge to all Finolhu guests as a courtesy. Kani guests can also get guest passes to visit Finolhu.
Last year’s tour took us to the very tip top of the Laccadive atolls, and this year’s trip takes us to the tippy toe – Addu (aka “Seenu”) atoll.
So far south that when you fly Maldivian Airlines, the pilot makes an announcement when you cross the Equator and the flight attendant hands out personalised “Equator Crossing Certificates” (see above photo).
Most Maldives atoll sprawl over dozens of miles and they are peppered with lots of little dots of islands inside them. You can cast a gaze on the horizon and typically see one or two of these green blots floating on the ocean. Addu, however, is one big circle of “islands”. Look on the inside of your location an you will see the thin emerald ribbon (periodically broken up) all around you. Look on the outside of your island and you will see nothing by wide open Indian Ocean (all the way to Antarctica to the south).
The one main downside to the marine topography is the limitations on classic house reef “drop offs”. These tend to be the domain of those intra-atoll little dots of which Addu doesn’t really have any. But the atoll delivers a range of other enticing attractions that might just make Addu well be worth the trip. It hosts 3 very distinctive resorts – Canareef, Shangri-La Villingili, and Equator Village. The turbo-prop transfer is about half the cost of a seaplane transfer to other islands that don’t have local airstrips (Haa Alifu to the north also has an airport). Being off the beaten path a bit means that its fine dive sites are not as crowded. We were all alone at our dive today and casting a glance on the horizon, there were only a couple of dive boats scattered among the dozens of dive sites. Famous manta haunts like Lankan and Hanafaru are so crowded that they have had to start limiting the number of divers visiting them. We were the only divers when we visited Addu’s own Manta Point (see below). The group before came up to our boat and told us they saw 9 mantas, but the current shifted and we only saw one. That said, he seemed as big as 9!’
Addu atoll feels like a sort of “Maldives Keys” (for anyone who has made the famous run down to Key West in Florida). A necklace of islands strung together surrounded on both sides by stereo ocean vistas.
