Our method
Most sites give a resort one number. We don’t believe one number can be honest — so we give you five, and let you decide which ones matter.
Kollection Maldives · our scoring method · last reviewed August 2026
Every score is measured against a standard we set once and apply to every island alike. A resort earns its 5 on its own merits — never by beating the island next door. Nothing is graded on a curve.
We score the five things that genuinely change a Maldives week. We never blend them into one score, because averaging hides exactly what you came to find out.
Behind each number sits a measurement you can check — metres to the reef, minutes from Malé, venues per hundred villas. We print the fact next to the score, every time.
The scale
The five
How far you swim to reach the reef, and how alive it is when you get there. Quality counts for more than distance — a close reef with nothing on it is still nothing to see.
An excellent reef a few strokes from the sand. You snorkel before breakfast because it is easier than not.
No real reef within swimming distance. Snorkelling means booking a boat and picking a time.
Measured in metres from shore, with reef condition graded on survey and dive-centre reporting.
How much island there is per villa. It decides whether the beach feels like yours or like a resort you are sharing, and it is the one thing a photograph will never tell you.
An island that reads as an estate. You can walk to dinner without passing another guest.
Villas packed tightly. You hear your neighbours, and the beach is a shared resource.
Measured as square metres of island per villa, from island area and villa count.
How long it takes to get from the airport to your villa, and by what. In the Maldives this is not a detail — it can cost you a day at each end, and a good deal of money.
Twenty minutes or less, usually a speedboat that runs whenever your flight lands.
Over an hour and more than one leg — a domestic flight, then a boat, on someone else’s timetable.
Total airport-to-island time, by the resort’s standard transfer. Seaplanes fly in daylight only, which we note on the page.
How many restaurants and bars there are, weighed against how many guests are on the island. You cannot leave, so the same room every night is a real consideration.
Enough kitchens to go a fortnight without repeating yourself, and enough range to feel like a choice.
Two or three venues for the whole island. By the third night you are ordering out of habit.
Counted as venues per hundred villas, so a large resort earns nothing simply for being large.
How much of the island exists to look after you — the depth of staffing behind the person you actually meet. It is what separates the price tiers once every villa has a pool.
Two staff for every guest. Things are handled before you have finished asking.
Thinly staffed for its size. You will wait, and you will notice yourself waiting.
Measured as staff per guest at full occupancy, read alongside what the resort actually promises — butlers, hosts, hours.
Just as important
We will not average five honest scores into one dishonest one. A resort with a poor reef and superb food is not a “7 out of 10” — it is exactly right for one traveller and quite wrong for another.
You will never read “number three of fifty-one” here. Everything in the Kollection has already cleared our bar to be listed; ordering the survivors adds drama, not information.
Whether an island welcomes children, or takes only adults, we state plainly as a fact — never as a score. A busy children’s club is the reason one family books and the reason a honeymooning couple books elsewhere.
We used to score how much a resort bundles into its headline rate, and we stopped. Clear money is what we promise to give you, not something to compress into a mark out of five — so we print the actual figures instead: the transfer, the taxes, what a week really comes to.
Where the numbers come from
Every measurement comes from one of three places: the resort’s own published rate card and villa specifications, operational data such as dive-centre and transfer schedules, or our own survey on the island. Where a figure comes from the resort, we take it from what they commit to in writing, not from what the brochure suggests.
Some inputs are harder to pin down than others. Staffing levels and island dimensions are not always published, and where we have had to work from category norms rather than a confirmed figure, we would rather tell you than pretend otherwise. Those are the numbers we are still tightening.
The bars themselves are fixed, but not frozen. When we learn something that makes a line wrong, we move it — and every island is re-scored at once, so nothing drifts out of step. Last reviewed August 2026.
Found something that doesn’t match what you saw on the island? Tell us. Corrections from people who have just been there are the fastest way this gets better.
Five honest readings beat one flattering number.
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