Your calls always answered within 5 rings.
Everything worked out exactly as planned. Wonderful holiday but good to know DialAFlight is always there if things go off the rails!
Always excellent service
Amazing! Everything was perfect
Lucy McNab was really good throughout
Callum was super as usual!
Fabulous as always
Excellent service and advice from Stacey
First class. The logistics for the whole holiday were excellent. Probably the best DialAFlight experience we have ever had.
Tristan always delivers at the highest level
All pretty good ...
All perfect, can’t wait to book again. Thank you Ashley.
Shelley Dimes was excellent, very efficient and always came back to us when she said she would. Very helpful all the way through giving us a wonderful holiday.
Thanks to everyone at DialAFlight. Especially Owen.
Great support from Logan and his manager
A really smooth operation flying into Male, getting a transfer to a sea plane and then to our resort and back. There was always a DialAFlight representative on hand to sort ourselves and our bags. The resort was also amazing. A great trip
Tara and Sean were amazing!
Great holiday, thank you.
Everything was perfect, thank you
Nicholas is a first class professional, always willing to go the extra mile.
Rebecca was fabulous, we will certainly be using her again!
Excellent customer service from Guy Foskin
The resort was excellent - couldn't fault anything from the villa to the food and staff
Excellent service and holiday went like clockwork!
Harriet matched our price. Ozen Life Maadhoo was perfection
Ryan is always a pleasure to deal with and takes away all the stress of booking holidays. Thank you DialAFlight for making our holidays amazing
A big thank you to Liam Rush who really went over and above to make our holiday fabulous.
Reece is a star, we had a fantastic holiday
Guy Foskin thank you for all your help - our holiday was amazing and made easy through your excellent service and attention to detail
Calvin is amazing. Sorted all flights, transfers and rescheduling when return flights were altered so we made the seaplane from the island back to main airport. The perfect bucket list holiday
Honestly, the whole experience was fantastic. Stacey is the best!
We drifted with the current. Beneath us bannerfish, butterflyfish, snappers, spangled emperors and unicornfish flitted about. Turtles and manta rays were miraculously unafraid.
We glimpsed the occasional reef shark; a brilliantly-maned lionfish. Who could resist another little passer-by named the seal-faced puffer? My wife Penny and I are passionate snorkellers, and the Maldives are among the great playgrounds for our kind.
Every hotel amid the thousand islands scattered across the Indian Ocean south-west of Sri Lanka offers boats for watersports and fish-watching.
Through the glass floor of our villa set on stilts above the sea at the Lux resort on South Ari Atoll, we watched the octopus that lived in a heap of rocks ten feet below. Remind me not to be reincarnated as an octopus: you spend half your life waiting for lunch to swim within tentacle-reach; the other half hiding, to avoid becoming somebody else's entree.
Guests reach the Lux resort via a half-hour flight, itself a pleasing little adventure, on one of the fleet of floatplanes that services the islands.
South Ari is less than a mile-and-a-half long, and one of its joys is the absence of motor vehicles: everybody walks, rides an electric buggy, or bikes. As the place is dead flat, even pedallers of our age are unlikely to suffer coronaries, and we went everywhere on two wheels.
The four restaurants serve every kind of Western and Asian food. We rotated between them, especially savouring the Italian place's pasta arrabbiata.
The Lux's 400-odd guests are a three-way spread of British, European and Asian. Each evening we walked the length of the island's pristine beach, watching tables set for the honeymooners who opted for candlelit dinners on the sand.
We fell in love with Goni, the warm, tough, laconic boatman who took us out to the reefs. I had special reason to appreciate him, because I would never have made it back into the pitching speedboat without being heaved onboard by his brute strength.
Uninhabited escape
On our most spectacular day, we peeled away from our usual group to take a private 20-mile trip to an uninhabited atoll.
On the passage we trailed long fishing lines, and I took up a rod to bring in a 20lb wahoo. Then for an hour we snorkelled blissfully, without another soul or boat in sight. Once ashore, Goni and his boys barbecued the wahoo and a couple of snappers. Penny and I lay idling, revelling in the dazzling white sand and azure sea.
Lunch was a gastronomic triumph, though if I am honest, the heavily-spiced snapper tasted better than my own catch. In the afternoon we snorkelled again, then Goni bounced us home across the sea at 40 knots.
Penny and I agreed that the remoteness, amid so much beauty, placed that day among the best of any holiday we remember.
Paradise must be preserved
As wonderful as it is, or simply because of its beauty, there is reason to be anxious about this paradise. On our barbecue atoll, it was of great concern to see it hasn't escaped the global plague of plastic waste, with many plastic bottles beached above the tideline.
And much of the coral in the Maldives is in a bad way - a stark reminder of what we have allowed to happen to the planet on our watch. It again highlights that unless concerted and decisive, committed action is taken, our grandchildren are unlikely to experience a fraction of the natural wonders we have seen, either at sea or ashore.
The damage to the reefs will of course also affect the fish populations - sealife won't thrive if the reefs continue to become sterile.
On a couple of our boat outings, in search of the hugely popular, brilliantly spotted whale sharks, we decided to leave the area because we thought rather too many snorkellers and divers were entering the sea each time a whale shark briefly appeared and we didn't want to add to the number.
We adored our Maldives fortnight, and would recommend the Lux to anybody active enough to swim, bike, eat and drink: Penny had to be dragged away from the infinity pool overlooking the ocean outside our villa.
Those who love such things should head for the reefs quick… while some remain. And we should redouble efforts to make sure future generations can also enjoy such wonders.
First published in the Daily Mail - March 2019
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