The cliché activity for kids clubs and events is face painting, but how about some body art more indigenous to the subcontinent – henna painting. Best known as a traditional wedding adornment for brides, henna tattoos can be used to celebrate any happy occasion. So the youngsters at Sun Siyam Olhuveli can have a distinctive way to physically ‘mark’ their joyful times in the Maldives.
15 years ago, I posted a piece “Best of Maldives Online – TA Resort Popularity: Vilamendhoo – Maldives Complete Blog”. TripAdvisor Maldives Forum had been emerging as the pre-eminent travel community in general and specifically about the Maldives (compared to other TA Forums, it is especially active and authoritative). Back then I was just starting to get involved as a regular contributor and reader and I sensed that there are some resorts which seemed to be quite favoured in the online group as signified by the number of mentions. I wanted to test this perception with a highly unscientific but at least objective survey of the posts. I chose to count the mentions of resorts in the Subject line of the posts over a 6-month period.
3,700+ contributions later, the Forum has palpably changed. For starters, there are now lots of enquiries about local islands which people visit with the many new guest houses on the scene. Debates about children on properties, the weather and resort aesthetics have died down, but the terraforming debate is as intense as ever.
The graph above shows the distribution of mentions across resorts which more or less follows the same shape as 2011. There is a slight flattening, but not as much as I thought there might be with the number of active resorts doubling from 99 then to 186 now. The top two mentioned resorts – Hurawalhi and Vilamendhoo – got a combined total of 10% of the mentions compared to 8% for the top 2 back then.
The big surprise was simply the number of overall mentions which was less than half. I think this is reflecting simply fewer posts in TripAdvisor. I would put this down to a general maturity of the web with resort website providing much more comprehensive and easy to query information about their properties. Not to mention the emergence of Social Media providing another whole category of online community to consult for information and advice. I belong to a few Facebook Groups focused on Maldives travel. Curiously, the engagement is a much high quantity than TA Forum (ie. each post gets lots more replies), but actually the quality is much lower (ie. lots of people responding with inane information based on very limited knowledge of the destination).
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One of my favourite tropical memories was when I lived in Togo, West Africa and a bunch of the local Peace Corps Volunteers invited me for a nighttime cookout on the beach. With the warm air and the always enchanting dance of flames in the fire pit dug out of the sand, the evening was quite magical. Oaga has introduced this experience for its all-inclusive guests called “O Fire”:
As the Maldives destination matures all the offerings just get more and more sophisticated. When we first started visiting the Maldives, one was luck to find a massage in a make-shift room by a contract therapist. Now resorts have luxury overwater spas with treatments so sophisticated they require trained medical staff. One of the most extreme is Sirru Fen Fushi offering IV infusions: