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Is Komandoo the one you can see from Kuredu, where we stayed many years ago? We paid £800 each for 2 weeks AI via Teletext. F & B were pretty grim; we ended up inventing our own cocktail from the limited types of spirits and fruit juices permitted in the package, by the end of the holiday everyone was ordering it at the bar. OH was blown away by the diving though and it was something of an unspoiled paradise. Apart from the flaming open-air bathroom!
I’ve done the cocktail thing in many a place. Best was teaching teetotal bartenders in the Abu Dhabi lounge how to make a white lady, which is often double in even rubbish bars.
Lhaviyani was certainly on my list as the scuba looks awesome. 800 quid all in is about as much as I will willingly spring for a water villa AI so will take another look. I got put off the highly rated Atmosphere as there is no local reef.
Please let us know if you can still get 14 nights AI for £800! I’m pretty sure those days are long gone, it was 1999 when we went.
I actually quite liked the rustic feel of the place back then (apart from the bathrooms!) We were in very simple thatched beach cottages, but they were widely spaced so you had a virtually private stretch of pristine white sand outside your door. You could see eagle rays and juvenile reef sharks from the water’s edge. I do like a good pampering but I can’t help feeling too much 5* luxury might detract from the raw natural beauty of the place.
Komandoo is near Kuredu but I don’t think you can see it from there. It is much smaller though, there is no volleyball or five-a-side and everything is on foot. The seaplane drops you on a pontoon and you get collected by boat. Nothing nasty like wristbands and staff pretty soon get to know what meal/drinks deal you are on. The ‘villas’ have open air bathrooms but we weren’t really bothered by any bugs – we preferred a beach villa to over-water, and suggest the east/sunrise side is best.
There seems to be a lot less marine life within the lagoon but the house reef is still good. If you go with the (gentle) current of the day, you can easily drift along the reef without much effort.
The cheapest way we did it was through Kuoni as a package but last time we went with Qatar in business from Rome for a bit over £3k and booked the resort direct.
It must have been a different island we could see then, I remember one night there was a violent thunderstorm, and the thatched roof of the main building was struck by lightning and burst into flames! We had a good view from the bar over on Kuredu.
OH would love to go back for the diving but I wouldn’t want a long transfer this time – we had to wait 3 hours for the seaplane as I recall, it was just a horrendous journey (economy on Airtours 😱, the things you do in your 20s!) QR looks to have multiple flights per day from DOH with some decent departure times. I looked at Seychelles as well but the flight is something like 2.30 am! But also need to look at the Mexico Pacific suggestion as well.
Please let us know if you can still get 14 nights AI for £800! I’m pretty sure those days are long gone, it was 1999 when we went.
I was meaning per night. Last time in 2019 we went, we got Vakarufalhi (now reopened as Nova) for £325/nt AI through hotels.com. The mid-range 5* resorts seem to be bottoming out around 600-800 though booking for April they are more like 1000-1200. My gamble is to wait until January/February to book, which I think won’t work for Komandoo as they already have poor water villa availability.
Since I have a handful of resorts in mind, the gamble will hopefully pay off. At some point soon I will pick somewhere cancelable just in case.
I was joking, but £800 per night is crazy! If I can’t get somewhere AI or FB under £500 pn I’ll be booking elsewhere. Not really tempted to use points as F & B is so expensive. I think Maldives had become a bit of a status symbol destination and priced accordingly. I have read that the islands are doomed to disappear under rising sea levels in the foreseeable future and the Maldivian government has bought land in Australia to relocate the population using the proceeds of tourism!
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