tom-schmitt

After reading the previous posts, it seems that the Hotel reaches, what was intended by the change of the benefits: People are cancelling their reward stays and spend their points in other locations, so Conrad Rangali only has to accomodate paying guests.
On the one hand on christmas and New Years Eve guests are willing to pay a minimum about 2500$ per night, having no problem to spend 40$ pp for breakfast and spending a lot more money on activities, champagne and dinner.
On the other hand the HHonors members, who are staying on points still with free breakfast at the moment, are not willing to return, if they have to pay for their breakfast...
So what do you think, which guests are more welcome?
In my opinion, if you cannot afford it, don't go there.
Not only travellers, also the Hotel managment is reading forums like flyertalk, where people are discussing about the cheapest way to spend their holiday in the Maldives: Buying beverages in a supermarket in Male, before heading to the islands, collecting the complimentary fruits and water at the gym, filling their pockets at the breakfast buffet,....
So no wonder they are taking away benefits.

westcoastbmx

http://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=15260331

Conradmaldives- per the above link is your spa still open?

ma91pmh

@tom-schmitt - you are only showing your ignorance of how award programs work. you think conrad maldives gets nothing for points stays??? think again. they get paid cold hard cash from the hilton honors program. while i am less familiar with hilton's program under starwood this amount can be very high depending on the season and occupancy rates. so it is ridiculous to think that somehow because you are staying on points conrad is not making money

this indeed makes the lack of breakfast for ANY guest using points ridiculous as all paid rates include breakfast as do paid and points rates at all competing non hilton properties. this is just the local properties here being abusive

i'd suggest those of you peeved at the latest take a look at the park hyatt. we stayed there when it was under alila management and it's a wonderful island. furthermore breakfast is included for everyone and while there is no explicit benefits list feedback has been they have treated their high status guests very well

ConradMaldives

Yes, all three spas are open.

pineapple_09

Glad to hear it ^ and thanks for confirming.

Huvafen Fushi have confirmed that their spas are open too (just read it there on another news report).

onlysuites

Are you offering any extra's or happy endings

Sorry just in the New year happy mood. Happy New Year in advance to you all.

texmanufan

Wow @tom-schmitt, I don't know where to start with your comments. Business isn't always as good as it is for these resorts as it is around the holidays. If you are right that they are trying to alienate these customers they don't want, then with political unrest going on now it might be a time to rethink the loss of business.

When I stayed on an award stay in Feb, I spent nearly $1k per day on the activities, dinners, etc you mention plus upgrades. Though I can afford the extra breakfast charge, it doesn't make a diamond feel welcome.

Water and fruit was already free in the room each day. It is not convenient nor wise to spend that portion of time of an expensive vacation to go to Male to save at a supermarket. By beverages, if you mean alcohol you can't buy there anyway. If non-alcoholic then you run the risk of going overweight on your relatively small weight allowance on the seaplane. I am sure one would cost themselves more money in this case.

Thunderroad

This is good to hear, for the sake of guests, hotels and especially employees. Perhaps this development will evolve into just massage parlors being closed in Male, and perhaps just temporarily at that.

Still, I suspect that even if this is a false alarm for the resorts it will hurt them somewhat. The Maldives is a long, expensive way to go for many guests. Even the prospect of the resorts there offering fewer amenities than other tropical destinations could deter visitors. Personally, the lack of spas wouldn't discourage my wife and me from visiting again (we'd stayed at the Waldorf/Beach House Maldives), but I could see some folks deterred by that possibility.

The potential good news for HH Diamonds is that these very unfortunate developments (not just the spa news, but the wider prospect of radical fundamentalist unrest and/or influence on government) could create some extra pressure for the Conrad to reverse or at least modify its breakfast policy, since the general tourist climate could deteriorate and it will want to generate business.

jasonvr

Not to go completely off topic here, but is this still true? I know that all paid rates used to include breakfast, but I can't find any reference to it on the site anymore. They have some AP rates that explicitly include breakfast and some that don't. This leads me to believe breakfast may not be included in all rates anymore

pineapple_09

All rates include breakfast as far as I know.

OliverM

Conrad Maldives, are you not ashamed? I think enough is enough! No free breakfast for diamonds? That is not acceptable!!!

ScreenGuy

To be fair, ConradMaldives has always been very responsive and helpful on this forum. It's probably fair to assume that they did not create the new "benefits".

ConradMaldives I do hope you pass on comments in this thread to the general manager.

OliverM

Screen Guy, I agree with you and I want to clarify that my post was not not for the user "Conrad Maldives" but for the hotel "Conrad Maldives" @:-)

ConradMaldives

Many thanks, and yes, all the comments in this thread have been passed on.

BarryL

This was posted yesterday. Let's hope they resolve this.

http://minivannews.com/travelandarts...-spa-ban-30167