yoyotogblo

I believe I made the change before the 30 days mark. Either way, on my reservation online, the change was successfully made.

bubu-SNA

Below is a mini-review from a 2 week stay in June/July of this year.

The good first.

• The staff is amazing and bends over backwards to accommodate the guests.
• The restaurant food is very good for what you can expect in the Maldives although I'll admit its on the pricey side.
• The breakfast buffet spread is excellent and really lacks nothing. I highly recommend ordering the banana pancakes at least once!
• The dive center is excellent all around. The dive boats are large, very comfortable, and overall the nicest & newest I've ever dived from. Most of my dives were private due to low demand. Demand to go to "fish head" and "maya thila". Spectacular sums it up well.
• Try the "maldivian" themed restaurant (it's serviced from the pool bar). Nobody seems to know about it! By far the cheapest option for dinner however be prepared for spicy!
• Very kids friendly despite a lack of a kids club. The staff again bent over backwards to make sure the kiddos were living on a steady diet of free "home made" fruit popsicle and magnum ice cream bars.
• The pool bar was very well run. The resort provided floats in the pool were also very welcome!
• The beach. Spectacular again...
• The complementary mini-bar (non alcoholic only).
• Elite status recognized with nightly turn-down gifts & premium bottled water.
• Lots of reef & sand sharks around the island. They actually "skim" the waves at dusk ridding in and out on the sand. Its pretty awesome to see. We had one beach in front of us before the next wave picked it up and let it ride back into the ocean.
• The 20% F&B discount for elites was very welcome.
• Both the "fish" & "fire" restaurants were great. I highly recommend the catch of the day at fish grilled "whole".
• Great business center with modern iMac's for guest use and very reliable fast internet.
• Cooking class for the kids was something both my girls enjoyed tremendously. They went twice for both pizza making & cupcake decoration.

The neutral thoughts

• The island is over-built. Removing 10 of the beach villas would have given them lots of privacy. That being said, they are still plenty private but you can hear your loud neighbors.
• Don't expect privacy with the over-water villas. Nature of the beast that you will hear your neighbors if they are loud or see people snorkel by. Most of the lagoon villas also have the disadvantage of anyone on the beach being able to see you.
• The odd "non-alcoholic" pretend alcoholic mixer drinks in the coolers around the resort were just weird. Nobody outside of the Chinese guests were taking any as far as I could see.
• The ocean facing water villas can get loud with a swell coming in and waves breaking on the pillions in the morning.
• The resident DJ "Jane Forza" played odd-ball euro-dance at the pool and mostly played with her phone the entire time. Most amusing thing was that she did not speak a lick of Italian (she was Russian).

The negative

• The "forced" Evan bottled water at dinner is annoying. It's a straight F&B revenue grab, nothing more. The resort makes an effort to brand itself as "Eco-Conscious" yet they fly glass bottles of water from France to force-sell at $12 per 750ml. The fact is most guests would not bat an eye if they charged $5 for the standard island glass bottled water at dinner. They would even come out ahead as I'm guessing importing the Evan can't be cheap to import. I guess the Evan appeals to Asian guests as a status symbol?!
• The shallow reef that's accessible by snorkeling around the island is dead. The coral all died a few years back due to prolonged high water temperature. There is signs of recovery but it'll be 10+ years before significant growth reappears. There is still tons of fish to see. When night snorkeling with my 8 year old we probably saw 7+ gigantic "white" lobsters at 2-3 feet on the ocean side reef.
• The "theme" dinners are ludicrously priced and a very poor value.
• The local "destination" fee is a straight revenue grab again. "Resort Fee" Maldivian style.
• Make sure your folio is 100% in order before you leave or you won't get the proper night credits. The property is difficult to communicate with to get nights/points credited properly after the fact.

Closing thoughts.

There is a kids club planned for the future. The property was very accommodating in having a 4th child in our room (we came with a 8 & 7 year old) although there was an up charge for the bedding. We spent a week in a beach villa and a week in an over-water, both are great. The beach villas have more open space if you have kids staying in the room with you, that said we had no problem with the over-water villa either. Food ran us around $200 per day for a family of 4. Kids received a 50% discount at the pool when ordering pizza. Most guests did not eat lunch and were following the "late breakfast" "early dinner" pattern. Once the sun goes down there is NOTHING social to do other than hang out at the sushi/fish restaurant bar. The resort was 90% full for most of the 2 weeks we were there in what the staff called "low season". I suspect a large portion of the guests were there on points (like ourselves).

hockeytravel

Can anyone elaborate on the Full/Half board? They sent me their menus and of course the first thing I look for is the cheapest option or deal. I have no idea what it means though and their answers weren't that clear.

For instance: LAND US$ 145 per person US$ 100 per person (full/half board)

Thanks!

bgriff

From what I understand, it might theoretically be an okay deal, but comes at the cost of a lot of constraints. Half board I believe is breakfast + either lunch or dinner, full board is all 3 meals. But, for Platinum or higher elites on points and on most/all cash rates, breakfast is included anyway, which immediately takes away a lot of the value. For non-elites and Silver/Gold elites staying on points, possible the inclusion of breakfast could make it worth considering.

Then on top of that, I'm not sure exactly what is included in the lunch/dinner meal that you get with the HB/FB package, but there are additional supplements for certain items. For example, on the Fish menu here, you can see that on the dinner menu (the last 3 of the 6 pages), you can either have one of the options on the first page, each of which has their own large supplement for HB-FB customers, or if you order from the regular menu on the second and third page, the footnote suggests that merely eating there will incur an extra $40++ supplement. The supplements for Fire are unclear based on the version of the menu we have, but Fire is the most expensive of the restaurants so I'm sure there are even bigger supplements there, or possibly it's not open to HB/FB use at all.

So I assume that the HB-FB package gets you a meal at Kitchen included, I'm guessing 3 courses but you'd want to confirm with the property. Kitchen menu is here. If you didn't otherwise have breakfast included, and if you didn't mind eating most/all of your dinners at Kitchen, and you appreciated being able to get a big dinner there, then I guess HB could be something of a deal relative to the regular costs for a 3-course Kitchen dinner. (The restaurants also rotate which nights they're open, with Kitchen not being open some nights and/or hosting theme nights which would surely incur a supplement, so I'm not sure if there is another no-supplement dinner option on those nights. Possible it's room service? I'm just guessing though.)

Finally, in your calculations it's also worth remembering that Plats and above get 20% off F&B, Golds get 15% off and general members/Silvers get 10% off, so everyone should be getting at least 10% off the menu prices, but I suspect that discount would not apply to the costs of the HB/FB package (and possibly also not to the costs of HB/FB supplements), so that's a further factor to be considered in the math.

hockeytravel

Bgriff you are the best and have helped me so much! I have ambassador status, so will take the free breakfast and just skip the HB/FB options. Thanks so much for all your help!!

platbrownguy

Some updates:

• 1. The 20% discount does indeed still apply to alcohol (if purchased alongside food and not via in-room dining), contrary to what the W staff at MLE said ^
• 2. One great benefit has been a free 15-minute add-on at the spa for each treatment we've booked -- you can choose from head massage, foot massage, facial, and a couple other things. Wife and I booked a total of 6 treatments -- were also given a complimentary bubble bath with champagne for our anniversary, in addition to the cake & balloon turndown in the room -- so the extra 15-minute treatments were very nice touches. I gather it's for certain elite status levels (we are Titanium).
• 3. Got our departure letter last night and it says we're on a 4:45 p.m. seaplane (with 4:15 p.m. checkout & luggage pickup from our villa) for an 8:20 p.m. flight. Other guests with later flights are on earlier seaplanes, so seems like we lucked out a bit there.
• 4. The big negative was that the property was not willing to do the whale shark snorkeling tour without at least 4 guests, even at a price tag of $450++ per person. They had boats sitting out on the water unused every day, and the labor is necessarily fairly static, and I even offered to pay some extra (expecting that they'd offer a private tour for the price of 4 or a willingness to compromise perhaps on the price of 3 -- but they didn't). GM was very upbeat about being able to put it together, but I haven't seen him the past 2-3 days since the dive shop confirmed that no one else was interested in the tour. Oh well.

Will respond to some of bubu-SNA's points later on -- mostly agree with them. For now, some shots from today & yesterday in the water -- hawksbill turtle (we saw 3), some of the corals that are doing ok, big shark (~6 foot), underwater W:

eat.drink enjoy.repeat

Thanks for the great review. Can you confirm what the local "destination" fee is? Is this separate from the seaplane transfer? I have a 5 night award stay coming up and I am being quoted a total of $1070 for 2 people. Is there additional fees charged?

PrivatePilotDR40

When I stayed in June (Review to come), when quoted online the local fee is the sea transfer fee. You are not billed this until you check out at the end of the stay.

platbrownguy

$1010 for the seaplane
$60 ($6pp/pn) for a local tax.

beagleflyer1977

How does one book this on points? Trying to book online but the points option keeps reverting to a cash rate.

Marriott Bonvoy Lurker II

Hi beagleflyer1977,

We have checked and are able to check points redemption rate for this hotel on its website.

Please try to clear caches, close the browser and open a new page to check. If you still encounter an issue, please let us know.

Best Regards,

Christina Zhou
Specialist, Social Media
Marriott International

[email protected]

chazas

For my points visit in November/December, I got an email offering US $400/night to upgrade to a fabulous oasis, and $500/night to upgrade to a spectacular lagoon oasis. I was not planning on upgrading in any event, but ouch.

Minnie Sota

I got the same one for October - not interested at that price.

davidrwu

Same here for end of November. I hope we can get better prices if we call.

Minnie Sota

I believe elsewhere on this thread there are reports of upgrades being offered once you arrive at MLE at a much reduced rate or free.