End of trip review
We finally returned today from our 10 day honeymoon trip and all we can say is wow. We were so happy with le meridien and their service. In the final 5 days since my last post we took a 2nd snorkel trip with the dive center and also snorkeled everyday off our villa. Rays turtles and fish were plentiful. The final 7 days of our stay the weather was wonderful. The first few days were very rainy, cloudy, and choppy seas. When the water was calm it was about knee to waist deep (I’m 6’) at low tide each morning of our ovw villa
the food overall was great! We did the greenhouse tour and had their Harvest table dinner after our final night. We highly highly recommend this. Yoga who is the manager of turquoise, recommended it to us and it was easily one of the highlights of our trip. A private 4 course meal and they even customized the menu to our preferences.
the only downfall in my opinion is the sea plane transfers to this resort. If we go back to Maldives it will be a boat transfer resort only. Our sea plane trip back was an absolute nightmare. We started by taking off at 2:30pm heading for one other stop at a resort and then scheduled to be in male by 3:30pm. After landing at the other resort to pick up passengers, we were asked to get off the plane due to the sea plane airport in malé being closed due to thunderstorms. This was a 10 minute delay and we were back on the plane. After attempting to fly to malé, we were informed in the air the airport closed again so we made an energy landing at another resort to wait out the storms. This delay lasted about 45 minutes and we were then quickly asked to board the sea plane again. The water was extremely rough during take off. They told us we were a short 15 minutes from malé. After 10 minutes the nightmare plane ride began. Our pilot attempted to fly us through a major thunderstorm and at one point lost visibility and navigation in the plane and thus flying the plane blind. I have never once been nervous on a plane before, in this ride I legit feared I was going to die. The worst turbulence I have ever experienced along with loud pouring rain and no visibility. After circling malé for 40 minutes(we had maps open on our phones trying to figure out ... was going on) in this hell the pilot did a 2nd emergency landing at the one and only resort. He didn’t communicate to us one time what was happening. Just kept trying to go through the storm. Every person in the plane was pissed and a few got sick due to motion sickness. The staff at the one and only resort was kind enough to put us on their large yacht and take us by water to the airport. The seas were very rough, 5-6 foot waves and more thunderstorms. More people got sea sick. Took 1 hour on the yacht and we pulled up to malé. Most in our group missed their flights, my wife and I were lucky our plane left at 11pm and made ours on time.
all in all it took about 4 hours for normally a 40 min trip….
the pilot clearly did not check radar and was trying to pull off a miracle. We will be following up with le meridien on this sea plane experience in hopes of a partial refund for the plane transfer.
overall amazing trip spoiled by a dumba** pilot trying to be a hero and not considering his passengers safety. It is because of this we may never return to Maldives.
some will say I’m overreacting and that they can’t control the weather. While this is true, I felt they should’ve checked a weather radar and considered our safety being the first priority. They were too worried about beating daylight…