REVIEW – Conrad Maldives : Seaplane Lounge MLE [Evening Departure]

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FOR INFORMATION ON HOW I BOOKED THIS STAY AT THE CONRAD USING POINTS, CHECK OUT THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS TRIP REPORT HERE:

FIRST CLASS APARTMENTS TO THE MALDIVES

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On our final evening our island host came to inform us that we would be required to move out of our Retreat Water Villa at the standard time of noon, the following day. Whilst you can generally expect to be granted a 4pm late checkout as a Hilton Diamond member, I was half expecting this given the level of occupancy at the resort and couldn’t really complain given the wonderful upgrade that we’d been given.

So, we got our things together early the following morning and enjoyed a final breakfast at Vilu before being taken to the main lobby to complete our checkout. Our main bags were kept for us and we just took a small bag to carry with us for the rest of the day.

With no villa to hang out in the choice was obvious; we were going to spend our last few hours in paradise, at the Quiet Zone pool.

Just as we were settling down to our second drink Naeem came running over and told us that he’d been looking all over for us. Apparently a storm was closing in and no matter the onward flight time, everybody would have to leave the island asap.

We jumped into a buggy and quickly settled up the bill for our drinks at the Quiet Zone, then headed to the gym to shower and change.

There were four planes lined up, ready to take all the day’s leavers to Malé. Thankfully we were on the last one, which meant we had a little bit of extra time to dip our feet into the water next to the lounge.

We were warmly welcomed back to the lounge by Afeef and told that since we had been forced to leave early (through no fault of the Conrad, as the schedules are set by the airline not them) we were welcome to help ourselves to whatever we wanted. Now the rules have changed and all Diamond members automatically get full dinner service for free, however back when we visited this was not the case. We would have been forced to pay $100 each for the privilege, if Afeef hadn’t extended us this generous gesture.

The dinner spread was quite limited, with only one hot meat dish, two types of vegetables and vegetarian spaghetti. The cold items were basically a pared down version of the offering at the Atoll Market breakfast.

I can’t imagine that anybody would ever pay $100 for this, after actually seeing what’s on offer.

 

Our driver was extremely friendly and keen to talk to us about photography, he could see that I was busy taking pics and asked if I wanted to see some pics he had taken at the resort on his phone. His shots were great! As we made our way around the runway and towards the main terminal, he stopped so that we could get a shot of the sunset:

 

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Conclusion

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The staff at the Conrad Seaplane lounge are extremely friendly, the space is clean, the seats are comfortable and the views are great. However, the dinner buffet seems like one last desperate attempt by the Conrad to extract cash from people for something that really isn’t worth the money. It’ a shame that the hotel has decided to leave customers with this as their parting memory.

 

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