My wife and visited the St. Regis Maldives on our honeymoon in November 2017. I have been meaning to post my thoughts / reviews for a while; sorry it took so long. This is probably going to be long. I hope some find it useful. I’ve gotten so much great info here on FT that I want to give back and do it justice. No snark please.
I am an SPG Lifetime Platinum (as of 2017) and we stayed for six nights. We booked five nights to get “fifth night free” and used the “SPG Resort Redemption” promotion to get 35% off. We then booked one additional night using Cash & Points.

One night: $290 (US) + 15,750 points booked into a garden villa
Five nights: 234,000 points (58,500 per night with fifth night free) booked into an overwater villa.

As others have noted it seems near impossible to get C&P here. I am not sure how it happened. I called to add one night and they offered it to me. Luck? Mistake? Exception? Who knows?!!

Seaplane transfer for two people came to $1,290.02 (incl taxes) and was charged to our folio.

Our total folio (excluding the one night on C&P and the seaplane) came to just over $4,000 US. That’s about $350 per person per day for food, drinks and activities. We aren’t big drinkers and did a few activities.

We spent the first part of our honeymoon in Sri Lanka and I purchased business class tickets on a brand new China Southern A330 for about $160 one-way. Sri Lanka is an amazing country and I highly recommend it. PM me if you want more details as I did an extensive write up of our itinerary. Rather than fly early from CMB to MLE we went the night before on China Southern and spent the night at an acceptable but not very nice hotel in Male City called The somerset hotel. China Southern flights and Somerset hotel were both booked using Chase Ultimate Rewards points.

Our hope was to get an early seaplane to the St. Regis and it worked out. We were scheduled on a 7:00am seaplane. The St. Regis and The Somerset did a good job of coordinating with each other. Somerset met us at the airport and took us to the hotel and also escorted us back to the airport at 6:00am the next morning and handed us off to the St. Regis team.

We were lucky - we got to ride in The Bentley from the seaplane check-in to the St. Regis airport lounge. The journey was about four minutes so if you don’t get it, you’re not missing much (other than bragging rights).

The lounge is nice. If you have arrived from a long trip there is a shower with St. Regis Remede bath products and nice towels. There’s a TV with satellite channels, good coffee / tea and some snacks. There’s no alcohol as it’s not permitted in Male. Service is slow - they seem to be a bit jammed and overwhelmed in the mornings. It’s a perfectly acceptable place to spend a few hours before your flight but if it was crowded and with a bunch of kids I could see myself enjoying it less.

When you get to the lounge they take your picture outside. They told it was a welcome picture but we later found it they use it in their daily briefings at the resort. They took our passports, made copies and essentially checked us in to the resort right there.

If you want to leave luggage at the lounge you can do this. We had extra weight so we left a bag at the lounge with no issue. Note that the seaplane baggage weights are strictly enforced but as a couple, they did let us combine our allowance.

Seaplane ride was a first for me and I enjoyed it immensely. I am a big guy (6’4”, 250 lbs) so the seats are tight. I recommend trying to get on of the seats in the first row behind the cockpit as they are more spacious. Our seaplane stopped at one nearby resort on the way so it was cool to get two takeoffs and two landings for one price ;-)

I had read reports of a St. Regis-branded seaplane mini-amenity kit given to guests but we did not receive this. Apparently it included a resort map, earplugs etc.

When we arrived at the resort we were greeted by a team of butlers and Alex, the Scottish GM, waving from the dock. This seems to be their standard welcome.

Our room was ready and where were given cold towels and whisked away to our room. As mentioned above our first night was on C&P and booked into a Garden Villa (GV) and our next five nights were in an Overwater Villa (OWV).

I had hoped that we get put straight into an OWV but no - they put us in the GV that we had booked. I was a little disappointed but they said all OWVs were occupied (which I only 50% believed). I was secretly hoping an upgrade to the larger St. Regis Suite OWV but no luck. We got the regular one but on the sunset side. Were in villa 534 which was about three quarters down the jetty.

The garden villa was lovely. If you find yourself in one of these you will enjoy it. It’s got an enormous vaulted ceiling which makes it feel huge. It’s got outdoor showers and a swinging loveseat outside and the pool is huge. Even though, in the moment, I yearned to go straight to our OWV I am glad we experienced this. It’s a stunning design - so much so that I wouldn’t mind having one as a vacation cabin somewhere someday. They sometimes sell these quite cheap at the last minute. I was periodically looking at prices. If you want to extend your trip by a day or two then this could be a good way to do it.

The next day we were moved to our OWV. Also beautiful and well documented here and on the blogs.

Out butler’s name was Ubad and he was generally great. He pre-booked us into dinners which was helpful and he was flexible when we wanted to change.

The food:

We did one dinner at “Cargo” (arabic) which was amazing.
Two dinners at Orientale (asian) - one of which was a special Sake tasting dinner
Two dinners at Alba - one was the mediterranean night buffet
One dinner at Decantur (Thanksgiving)

I thought the food and drink was excellent. Yes, it’s expensive - but you are in a top resort in the Maldives. It costs a lot to get the food there and costs even more for quality ingredients. Much of the fruits and vegetables come from India and Sri Lanka and meat comes from Europe and Australia via Dubai.

Breakfast buffet was amazing. You have this gigantic buffet (biggest I have ever seen) AND the full menu to order from. If you’re Platinum then you’d be foolish not to take the breakfast. We had fresh juices each day, tea, coffee. I usually ordered sushi. They had an amazing citrus salad that we had on most days too.

Our strategy was to have a big, leisurely breakfast and an earlyish dinner. We’d either skip lunch or have a snack. I always have some ziplocs in my luggage and we snuck them into breakfast each day and took a bowl of dried fruit and a bowl of nuts and seeds and stealthily put them into the ziploc. Shhhhh.

Some of my memorable dishes:

• Sashimi plate at breakfast
• Citrus green leaf salad at breakfast
• Caesar Salad Wrap at lunch (amazing)
• Lobster tomato soup at lunch
• Broccoli Malai at Orientale (this is sensational - and it’s Broccoli !!!)

Pro tip: the room service menu is fantastic. The kids size pizza is good enough for an adult. In fact, the kids menu looked pretty damn good and was substantially less expensive.

We’re not heavy drinkers but enjoy nice wine. We enjoyed wine by the glass mostly and the selection was good. We love our food and I have a big appetite but we didn’t go overboard. Our lunches and simple dinners were approx $200 US total.

We got to know the Head Chef, Ayyoub a bit. He’s Jordanian and grew up in Australia and such a nice man. He’s been with the resort since pre-opening and he shared that his philosophy on the breakfast buffet was to make it memorable and a wonderful start to everyone’s day.

One thing I appreciated about the food was it wasn’t dripping in sauce or oil. Everything was delicious and lots and lots of delicious healthy options.

We did dinner at Decanter on Thanksgiving night and it was wonderful. It was great to meet some like-minded people (I think all nine of us were on SPG points). It’s expensive (total cost for two people was $899.36) but we left stuffed and pretty loaded. Ayyoub (head chef) and Julius (somm) host the dinner and it was memorable. Very cool to be sitting in a $3mm wine cellar in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

They also had a special Sake Tasting dinner at Orientale on our last night. They had an Italian Woman from Dubai who is a Sake Sommelier host the dinner (cuvee3_sommelier on Instagram). There was a suggested menu but you could order whatever you wanted and then the sake testing was $65 US. Total price was $397.94 for two people. Was fun to learn a little bit about Sake. The Sake Sommelier worked for the distributor in Dubai who supplies the Sake so it was a bit of a marketing stunt - fun nonetheless.

The service:

Generally was very good. Amans have been mentioned upthread a few times. I’ve stayed at a few Amans and it wasn’t up to the same quality but still very good. For example, occasionally they’d forget things (coffee refill, juice). On our first day we had an early lunch (breakfast wasn’t included the day we arrived) and they forgot the fries with my caesar wrap.

The bikes:

Every guest is assigned a bicycle. We didn’t know this and just took bikes that were sitting by the beach. Woops. Ask for a bike. The adjustments may be a bit rusty so ask for an engineer to come and adjust the seat and handles for you. I asked if they had something we could use to mark our bikes and they came with little wooden signs with our names hand carved. See photo. It was an amazing touch and we brought them home with us.

They are supposed to be getting a laser wood cutting machine to do this for every guest.

Activities:

Mrs. GG loves to maintain a healthy lifestyle and was glad they had a gym and free classes. I have attached the class schedule here. They do yoga every morning at the front of the spa (we did this once - 8:00am was a bit early to do each day) and then each afternoon (except Tuesday) at 4:00pm there is a group fitness class. It’s different each day: Boot Camp, Jumping, Tabata HIIT, TRX etc. I have attached the schedule we had in November. The instruction was an Indian guy and very nice. There’s also an evening group meditation class which we did not do.

I’ve seen others comment that the gym is too small. It’s small but has what you need - equipment is new and high end. It was never crowded. At most there were two other people there in addition to me and my wife. It is located in the giant “Vommuli House” which also houses the kids club. This building is absurdly huge so yes, the gym and the fitness studio could be bigger. Not sure the point of having such a big building. .

My wife played tennis three times. She tried to get me to play but I said no… but I’ll find you someone. I found two takers here on FlyerTalk in this thread. So keep that in mind if you are looking for a tennis partner or someone to share in activities. Thanks for the fun times @CanadianGeese and @dmbfan222 - it was great to meet and hang out IRL.

We did a great SCUBA dive morning which was fun. We had to get up earlier to have some breakfast. The dive boar and equipment is nice. There were six guests on the dive and we went about 25 minutes off the resort.

On this dive we saw octopus, three rays, large five foot nurse shark and an enormous lobster. I’m glad we did the dive. The dive costs $80 plus a $20 boat fee. It irritated me that they charge a boat fee - I have never seen this before.

We also did “seabobbing” and I am so glad we did. We just did for 30 minutes. It was expensive at $170 per person for 30 mins but a unique experience. Initially I thought it was one of those old underwater powered things but it’s not at all. It’s like a hand-held jet-ski. These things cost $8000+. The wife enjoyed it too.

One of the Butlers is an astrology guru (not sure if he is pro or amateur). Occasionally he sets up a telescope on the roof of Alba and does a little talk on the stars. We didn’t do this but it sounded fun and wish we had.

We each had a massage. Total cost was $563 for two massages. It was very good - one of the top five massages I have had. Lovely room where they did both of us. Great service. In hindsight I wish I had done a second massage.

Finally, we visited the Blue Hole. I think it costs $65 per person for a two hour experience. This is their outdoor hydrotherapy pool at the spa. We were offered it for free as we were on our honeymoon. We both enjoyed it.

There are plenty of board games and books available for you to borrow as well.

The Tech:

I have Project Fi and T-Mobile and neither worked but the wifi was available in the rooms and all public areas and was pretty good. IIRC I was getting 2-5 mbs.
The lights, curtain and TV in the room are controlled by an iPad. I found this annoying as it never works as well as you hope it will. I wished they had a regular TV remote to use with the TV rather than the tablet.

I also missed having a speaker / sound-dock in the room. We left this behind to save weight as I brought my dive equipment to the resort. I am an Android guy. The B&O TV system has some sort of AirPlay capability but it didn’t work for me. I wanted to use Spotify but you couldn’t be on the hotel wifi AND cast to the TV. That was disappointing.

I was also surprised to see Alex Jones InfoWars as a pre-programmed internet channel on the TV. He’s a pretty vile person who is openly racist, secist and homophobic and it just didn’t fit with the St. Regis brand. I passed this on to the GM and am curious if they have removed it.

Some comments on fit/finish and wear/tear:

The resort is only a year old and I get that it is in the Maldives and exposed to the elements but felt a few things needed better upkeep. Our sliding doors to the deck jammed quite a bit and sometimes the motorized shades would get stuck on the way down.

In the bathroom there were a few places where the caulking was coming apart etc.

Small things, but when you think that the cash cost of these rooms is $2,000 a night you’d think they’d have their eyes on this.

As an SPG Platinum:

I didn’t feel we got any extra special treatment as a PLT. We got the breakfast but not much else. You can see the SPG Platinum welcome letter attached to this post. I am not 100% sure if we got the 10% discount on the spa appointment.

Yes, we got an OWV that faced the sunset side. I am pretty sure that a couple of the St. Regis Suite OWVs were empty so it would have been a nice touch but honestly, the rooms a sensational.

The free stuff:

Here are the things we enjoyed for free.

Free bottle of champagne, fruit plate and treats in the room on arrival. Treats were some chocolates and middle eastern treats (baklava etc). WOuld have been nice if they topped off the treats each day. That would be a low-cost nice thing to do for PLTs.

Because we were on our honeymoon we got to participate in a group “Champagne Sabering” at The Whale Bar one night. That was more fun that I thought it would be - partly because we were also hanging with our new tennis friends.

Butler service will do free pressing for two items per person per day. It was nice to feel like a real grown up and go to dinner with an ironed shirt each day.

They give you a tube of SPF 30 sunscreen in your room every day so there is no need to bring sunscreen (or don’t bring much). I expect they’ll give you more if you ask for it. There is also a large sunscreen dispenser by the pool.

They also provide you with natural mosquito repellent spray in your room as well as two mosquito repellent bracelets. I think it’s all citronella based and without chemicals.

The Remede products are nice and were restocked daily. They included a Remede face cleanser (“souffle” they call it) which I hadn’t seen before.

One four out of our six days our butler put fresh coconut water and some cookies in our room.

Two nights they drew a romantic bath with rose petals. One one of these nights they included a small “Happy Honeymoon” cake. It was delicious.

One night there was a Manager’s Cocktail Party at The Whale Bar. Free drinks and snacks and free 10 minute chair massages by the spa team. That was a lot of fun and I must have had four or five drinks. They serve their signature bloody Mary (Island Mary) as well as red and white wine. We found out about this from another guest so you may need to ask. It sounded like they do it every week.

The Yoga and Fitness Classes

Books and Board Games

Tipping:

• 10% is added to every bill but we gave some extra cash tips the day we departed as follows:
• Butler: $250
• Somm: $50
• Fitness instructor: $40
• 2 waiters: $50 each
• Alba hostess: $20

Things to complain about:

As mentioned previously, there’s some wear and tear that I think they need to sort out.

I found the tablet in the room annoying

It annoyed me that Alex Jones / InfoWars had a permanent home on the tablet

There were a couple of spelling mistakes on the tablet spa menu. Not a big deal but careless for a resort of this caliber.

If you stay in one of the Garden or Beach Villas they do some serious mosquito fogging a couple of times a week. They provided no notice or warning. The fog was heavy and we initially thought something was on fire. They use a product called “King Fog” which uses Deltamethrin 1.25% w/w UL as its active ingredient. At a resort like this I would have expect (a) advance notice and (b) information on the chemicals used. Anyone pregnant or a couple thinking about conceiving would be alarmed by the thickness and odor.

Some final thoughts:

The property is beautiful. Whatever room you are in, you will love it. Even though we were in an OWV we also enjoyed time at the beach.

Yes, it’s expensive and I had complete and utter sticker shock when I arrived. But it was my honeymoon and I got over it fast. The reality is that you are a captive audience.

I really enjoyed the staff. Our butler, Ubad, Ayyoub (chef), Julius (somm), Sinan (waiter) and Pop (Alba hostess) really made our stay. It was nice to see them each morning and have them remember us.

I wish they “pitched” the amenities differently. When your butler gives your welcome briefing he/she will tell you about various activities. For example: you can do deep sea fishing for $1000. Whoa! $1000 !!!! Well, you can also go deep sea fishing for $150 on a group boat. Why not lead with this? They seem to lead with the most expensive options - if I were them, I’d do it in reverse and pitch the more reasonably priced activities first.

I am definitely looking forward to going back in a couple of years.

OK, that’s all. See attached files for reference and sorry about any typos.