Fantastic stay with my partner.
We had an even numbered beachfront room and would recommend this - means you can walk straight onto the beach.
The staff are excellent and really do go above and beyond. This was the best service I have ever had on holiday. A special thank you to Desy and Puja for their attentive service in the bar, to Rumesh for his Bailey's iced coffees in the pool bar, Rafa for being so kind and friendly in the restaurant, Cindy for making sure we were always looked after and for her excellent service in all three restaurants, and to Shah for attentive service in the restaurant. The staff all work very hard and to a very high standard.
The cleaning in our room (140) was also very thorough and to a high standard. We enjoyed the towel sculptures greatly!
The shuttle golf buggies around the two islands were very helpful when tired. We usually walked but took advantage when in a rush.
The food in the buffet restaurant was fantastic. Lots of choice, including for vegetarians, plenty of variety of cuisine and variation within the stations (Asian, Mediterranean, Western, noodles, carvery). We enjoyed the Japanese restaurant (tuna steak was great) and Crytsal restaurant (steak and tuna were both good).
The bar service was always excellent, with table service extending to sunbeds. Drinks options were good - whilst only one beer, plenty of spirits and cocktail options.
We loved the beach - the sand was so soft we could walk barefoot. Outside our room we could snorkel in the sea and saw eagle rays, baby sharks and fish.
The house reef on the Atoll side is more interesting to explore and deeper. The house reef wasn't the most colourful and appears to be in recovery post bleaching event. That said we still had fun exploring and saw stingrays and sharks.
For nature lovers, well worth going to the reception area at night to watch the fish, sharks and occasional stringray swimming past. We loved spotting the sealife whilst walking around the resort - there were often baby sharks just off the beach.
The gym is limited. There are three treadmills, bikes and a cross-trainer. No bench for weight training, but dumbells and a few other machines. You can run across the island as the resort is reasonably large. It's about 2k from end of Palace to end of Atoll.
Watersports were fun and the staff friendly. We went on pedalo and paddleboards.
We are newly qualified PADI Open Water divers and enjoyed 7x dives with the team at ScubaCaribe. Special thank you to Regi for looking after us and building our confidence on dives. The dive sites were drift dives and across our 7x dives we saw 6x blacktip reef sharks (larger than the baby ones at hotel), 2x turtles, 4x moray eels and various other fish. The coral is not as colourful as the Red Sea, and visibility varied (usually moderate). The dive sites we experienced were a mix of underwater islands, coral walls and channel dives. Niyama Faru, Maenboodhoo Thila, Enboodhoo Faru, Maeenboodhoo Faru, Enboodhoo Kanmathi, Vaanee Faru (my favourite) and Sirru Thila.
Be warned that we were sold a holiday by Emirates with $460 of "resort credits", $260 at ScubaCaribe, $200 on spa. These were only redeemable as 5-10% discounts on one or two activities which we didn't want to do. I felt this was mis-selling by Emirates given the small print did not reference exclusions. Not the fault of the resort but watch out for Emirates.
