An Isle of One's Own

Founder of The Business of Fashion, IMRAN AMED tells us what makes the Maldives such a huge draw among celebrities, and how one resort is standing out.

- IMRAN AMED

I HAD DREAMED OF LANDING at the Velana International Airport in the Maldives archipelago for as long as I can remember. But I was also well aware that, sometimes, these dreams simply don’t match up to reality. Rather, reality just doesn’t live up to the dream. So when, after almost 20 hours of flying, my Maldivian reality was about to come into sharp focus, I braced myself for disappointment.

After all, so many of the Bollywood elite class—not to mention the rest of the world’s rich and famous—have come to the Maldives ever since the first luxury resorts opened here back in the mid-1990s. Among the pioneering resort developers were Sonu Shivdasani and his wife Eva Malmström, whose Robinson Crusoe-style Soneva Fushi combines a rustic luxury experience, built for social interaction, with all of the services and conveniences of a full-service luxury hotel, while the principles of sustainable tourism stay at the forefront. In the early years of the archipelago’s tourism, it was this kind of down-to-earth escapade that defined the Maldivian dream.

From there, the tourism industry grew rapidly. There are over 100 hotels and resorts on the archipelago today. Before the dawn of tourism, the Maldives used to be among the world’s poorest economies, dependent primarily on fishing and smallscale exports. By 2017, the country was welcoming over one million tourists per year, and tourism accounted for more than 25 per cent of its GDP.