When we went: December 2022

Truly the most magical place I’ve ever been!

There’s not really much to do there so this will be short & sweet:

There are so many options for hotels but we stayed in an “Ocean Overwater Pool Villa” at  The Standard and it was awesome. Once you’re there you’re there, so there’s not much to do but it’s absolutely stunning and so serene. 

we spent the days:

• Snorkeling right outside our villa 
• Playing tennis
• Sitting by the pool
• Taking beach walks around the perimeter of the island
• Eating at the various restaurants they had on-site
• Kayaking 

They also had other activities for additional fees, like a dolphin sunset cruise, renting jetskis, etc.

I’m not sure how other resorts do it, but The Standard had a few different package options for food and drink. There’s an all inclusive option but we opted out of it (I don’t drink so it’s usually not worth it), and instead just paid for what we got. They had a handful of restaurants so it gave a pretty good variety for us to choose from throughout the week. 

getting to & from:

You’ll fly in and out of Male International airport (MLE) and then will need a seaplane to your resort (some of the closer resorts only require a speedboat). You can arrange the seaplane with your hotel directly, but keep in mind it’s $250/pp roundtrip (as of Dec. 2022).

We were coming from Southeast Asia so getting there was pretty easy, but travel from the US is effort. But absolutely worth it!

The seaplanes don’t fly in the dark, so you’ll want to keep that in mind when booking your flights. Try to land with lots of daylight to spare (I think if you land at night you may just have to get a hotel on the mainland for the night). Our flight home was a redeye, which proved to be a bit annoying. Even though we didn’t takeoff til 11pm, we had to leave the resort at 2pm because of the seaplane. So we had literally like 9 hours in the capital city – woof. We got roped into a tour of the city to pass the time and it was kind of a scam. Next time I’ll plop myself at the airport lounge instead.