About Maldives Travel Guide

Maldives Travel Guide is an independent reference for people planning a trip to the Maldives. We cover the part of planning where brochures stop being useful: which atoll suits which kind of holiday, which domestic airport your resort actually uses and what that transfer involves, how the diving changes between Vaavu and Fuvahmulah, and what a given month really looks like in the water rather than in a marketing calendar.

We are not a booking agent, a tour operator, or a resort. We do not sell trips and we do not take bookings.

Contact: mail@maldivestravel.fyi

Who writes this site

Maldives Travel Guide is written and maintained by its editorial team. Articles carry a team credit rather than individual bylines.

That is a deliberate choice, and worth explaining. Most pages here are built by more than one person and then re-verified over time — one researcher assembles the transfer and route tables, someone else checks them against current operator schedules months later. Attaching a single name to a page made that way would misrepresent how it was actually produced.

Where a specific person contributes genuine first-hand knowledge — a dive instructor describing how a channel behaves on an incoming tide, a surfer correcting our swell window, a guest correcting a transfer time — that person is credited by name, with their role and organisation, inside the article itself.

How we research

We work from primary and official sources. Our starting point for anything factual is the organisation that actually holds the information: the airline that operates the route, the company that runs the airport, the government body that publishes the statistic. Where a claim rests on one of these, we say so in the text and record when we checked it.

We verify each claim against its source, not against other travel sites. Other publications are useful for locating a claim. They are not sufficient to establish one. If we cannot trace a fact back to an official or operator source, we either leave it out or state plainly that we could not verify it.

Where sources disagree, we publish the disagreement. Something as basic as the number of airports in the Maldives has several different published answers depending on how you count. Where there is no single authoritative figure, we present the competing versions and explain why they differ, rather than picking the tidiest number and presenting it as settled.

We date everything that expires. Prices, schedules, seaplane operating windows and transfer arrangements change. Pages containing this kind of information carry the date we last verified them.

We say where a photograph came from. Some images here are our own, taken on the islands we write about. Others are licensed stock, and a small number are diagrams we draw ourselves from published data. Where a picture is our own, the caption says so and names the island and the year. Where it is not, we never present it as evidence that we have been somewhere.

We separate what we have seen from what we were told. Both are legitimate. Blurring them is not, so we don’t.

The full methodology, including our review cycle and independence rules, is on our Editorial Standards page.

Sources we use

These are the primary sources our research draws on.

Government and regulatory

Ministry of Tourism and Environment — tourism.gov.mv — tourism regulation, registered establishments, monthly arrival statistics
Maldives Civil Aviation Authority — caa.gov.mv — aerodrome status, operator certification
Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation — transport.gov.mv — transport policy, ferry network development
Maldives Bureau of Statistics — statisticsmaldives.gov.mv — population, island and tourism data
Maldives Immigration and the IMUGA portal — immigration.gov.mv / imuga.immigration.gov.mv — entry requirements and traveller declaration
Maldives Meteorological Service — meteorology.gov.mv — monsoon patterns, rainfall and wind data
Maldives Marine Research Institute — mmri.gov.mv — reef and marine species research
Environmental Protection Agency — epa.gov.mv — protected areas and marine protected area designations
Visit Maldives (MMPRC) — visitmaldives.com — official destination information and events

Airports

Maldives Airports Company Limited (MACL) — macl.aero — Velana International Airport, Noovilu Seaplane Terminal, and airports developed and owned by the state
Regional Airports Company Limited — airports.mv — domestic and regional aerodrome operations

Airlines and air transfers

Maldivian (Island Aviation Services) — maldivian.aero — the national carrier and the largest domestic network
Manta Air — mantaair.mv — domestic scheduled flights and seaplane transfers
Villa Air / Flyme — flyme.mv — domestic scheduled flights
Trans Maldivian Airways (TMA) — transmaldivian.com — seaplane resort transfers

Sea transfers and ferries

Maldives Transport and Contracting Company (MTCC) — mtcc.mv — public ferry operations
Raajje Transport Link (RTL) — rtl.mv — the national integrated ferry network, schedules and fares
Resort and guesthouse reservations departments — for speedboat transfer times, frequencies and pricing, quoted with the date we asked

Individual articles cite the specific source behind each figure. Where a source is missing from this list because a particular article needed something else, that article names it.

Contribute your expertise

If you work in the Maldives and want to share first-hand information about your service, hotel, guesthouse, dive centre or surf camp, write to expert@maldivestravel.fyi.

We are looking for the kind of detail that only comes from being there: what conditions are actually like on a given site in a given month, what a transfer really involves, what guests consistently get wrong. Contributions are published as a named expert comment, credited to you with your role and organisation, and linked to your website or profile.

Found a mistake? If you have spotted an inaccuracy in one of our guides, send us the corrected, verifiable information at the same address. We will publish it as an expert comment and credit you as the source.

Expert reviewers. We also work with a small number of expert reviewers — people with recognised professional standing in diving, surfing, marine science or Maldives hospitality — who review our coverage in their field before publication and are named on the pages they review. If that is something you would like to do, write to expert@maldivestravel.fyi.

What we can offer: a named credit, a link, and an honest hearing. What we cannot offer: favourable coverage, a placement, or a ranking. Contributing does not change how we assess your business elsewhere on the site, and we say so up front so that nobody contributes under a misapprehension.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know and we will fix it visibly, with a dated note. Reports go to mail@maldivestravel.fyi or expert@maldivestravel.fyi. Details are in our Corrections Policy.