all due respect to offline travel agents and the hard work and expertise they can provide, those traveling to the Maldives for a private-island holiday don’t really need them, and will almost certainly save money without one. If you’ve only ever booked luxury holidays with your friendly neighborhood travel agent, then you might as well carry on doing that. But if you don’t have a travel agent and unsure of the value they bring, read this article and you’ll discover that you are probably better off without them.
Unfortunately for many of us, overwater bungalows and water villas are expensive, sometimes shockingly expensive. So it’s a common question about how to book one of these beautiful rooms at a discount, and there’s some good news about that below.
If you are booking a honeymoon trip and, for example, you want to stay at the same resort where the Kardashians stayed in Bora Bora, then you might have to pay full price.
Serving as one of the world’s most popular and famous tropical island escapes, a vacation on the island of Bali brings in the majority of tourists that empower Indonesia’s local tourism. However, once you start looking into a vacation here, you may become a bit confused on whether or not there are any overwater bungalows on-site. This is because there is a local resort, Club Bali Hai, that claims to have invented the first overwater bungalows.
The AVANI Sepang Goldcoast Resort opened in 2011 with much higher room rates and the early reviews were quite poor, but they have been getting steadily better ever since, and room rates are now very appealing for a “water villa.” So I booked myself 2 nights here as part of a short trip to Malaysia, after two nights in Kuala Lumpur.
The AVANI Sepang Goldcoast Resort has 392 water villas, which made it by far the largest such resort in the world until a nearby competitor called the Lexis Hibiscus Port Dickson recently opened with 522 water villas.
Honduras is definitely a country on the upswing with its tourism industry, featuring excellent weather most of the year in addition to extremely reasonable prices for everything. The islands just off the coast of Honduras even contain 3 eco-resorts that have overwater bungalows, though they aren’t a proper substitute for the honeymoon-style resorts in Bora Bora of the Maldives.
If you are looking for a deluxe 4-star or above room with air conditioning and an entertainment center then you won’t find such a thing anywhere but French Polynesia or the Maldives, but those who are looking for an active vacation and affordable all-inclusive rates will find a few very good choices here.
we first had the idea to create a worldwide directory of every overwater resort in the world, we honestly assumed there were about 20 or maybe 30 of these places. It turned out we underestimated by quite a bit, and since new ones keep opening up, the number keeps getting higher and higher.
A couple months ago I wrote a post called where are overwater bungalows, which lists all the major spots in the world where you can find these things.
The Maldives is notably one of the best scuba diving designations in the entire world, partly due to the clear waters that are consistently warm all year round, and partly because the Maldives is home to an abundance of sea life surrounding each of its excellent private-island resorts. Here you’ll find large schools of tropical and colorful fish, larger marine life and some of the healthiest coral on the globe. With this, you can choose nearly any Maldives water villa resort and you’ll find some of the best diving in your life.
Whether you refer to them as overwater bungalows or water villas, these hotel suites on stilts in the ocean are a dream accommodation for honeymooners and romantic couples everywhere. We are the world’s first and only complete guide to all of these places around the world, and we’ve been doing this since 2011.
People always ask which are the absolute best overwater villa resorts in the world and we usually say that it depends on where you are coming from and where you want to go.
With a remote location near the equator, the 112-room Ayada Maldives Resort is now opening, bringing the first Turkish-themed resort to the Maldives. Developed by the Ankara, Turkey-based Aydeniz Group, this is a serious 5-star-plus resort that should compete well among super-luxury Maldives resorts.
From the decorations in each room to the Turkish hammam with plunge pools to the Turkish cafe (one of 7 restaurants and bars), the theme makes the Ayada Maldives a unique entrant in this category and one of the few resorts in the country meant to conjure up imagery other than the tropics themselves.
Interest in honeymoon-style overwater bungalows in the Caribbean is extremely high, and there is a new reason to be optimistic that we may finally get them after an announcement recently in the Bahamas. According to the Nassau Guardian, a proposed resort called Leaf Cay in the Exuma Island chain has won approval from the government for its plan to build a private-island resort similar to those in the Maldives and Bora Bora.