The most expensive holiday you will take this summer is the one you did not choose.
You chose the WhatsApp group. You chose the Instagram grid. You chose the seating plan at last Saturday’s dinner where someone said “we’re doing the Maldives again” and everyone nodded.
That is not a holiday. That is a subscription.
Let me be clear. The Maldives is extraordinary. I have sat on the deck of a water villa at Soneva Fushi at six in the morning, watched the reef sharks trace their circuits below, and felt something close to silence for the first time in months. The marine biology is staggering. The hospitality infrastructure — particularly at properties like Cheval Blanc Randheli and The Ritz-Carlton — operates at a level that most destinations cannot touch.
The Maldives is not the problem.
The problem is what happens when a destination becomes a reflex. When you book it not because you interrogated what you want from seven days away from your life, but because it is the frictionless default. The safe choice. The one that requires no explanation at the club.
Indian luxury travel has developed a very specific rotation. The Maldives for the couple’s trip. Santorini for the anniversary. Switzerland for the family summer. Dubai for the long weekend. These are not bad destinations. They are, every one of them, genuinely good at what they do. But when did you last sit with the question that precedes the booking?
What do I actually want to feel?
Not where do I want to go. Not where should I be seen. What sensation, what shift, what recalibration am I paying for?
Because the answer changes things.
If your honest answer is “I want warm water and genuine solitude — not the curated version where thirty other villas are doing the same thing,” then you do not want the Maldives this time. You want Mozambique’s Bazaruto Archipelago. Specifically, you want Azura Benguerra. Six-hour journey from Johannesburg, puddle-jumper to Vilankulo, helicopter across the channel. Twenty villas on a sandbar where the dhow traffic has not changed in four hundred years. The diving off Two Mile Reef is on par with anything in the Indian Ocean. The difference is that you will not see another tourist underwater. You will see whale sharks in November. You will eat peri-peri prawns pulled from the ocean that morning by a fisherman named Carlos who has worked the same stretch of beach since 1998.
That is not a lesser Maldives. That is a different answer to a different question.
If your answer is “I want beach luxury that my children will not destroy and my parents will not complain about,” you do not need another week in Europe. You need Oman’s Musandam Peninsula. The Six Senses Zighy Bay, specifically after the war — which you reach by speedboat or paraglide, and where the kids’ club is genuinely good rather than performatively good. The fjords of Musandam look like someone dropped Norway into the Arabian Sea. The water is warm. The snorkelling is better than you expect. Muscat is ninety minutes away for anyone who wants a city day. Direct flights from every Indian metro. No visa complexity.
The Six Senses Zighy Bay, image by Hamdan Yoshida, Shutterstock
And if your answer is “I love the overwater villa concept but I want it to mean something beyond the villa itself,” then skip the Maldives this year and fly to Misool Eco Resort in Raja Ampat. It is not easy to get to — Jakarta, then Sorong, then a four-hour boat ride through islands that make you understand why Wallace drew the line where he drew it. But the reef system is the most biodiverse on the planet. That is not marketing language. That is marine census data. Misool was built by conservationists who turned a shark-finning zone into a no-take marine reserve. Your stay funds 300,000 acres of ocean protection. The villas sit over water that contains more species per square metre than anywhere else you will ever swim.
You will come home with a story no one at dinner has heard before.
Now. I should be honest about something.
Contrarianism is its own trap. “I don’t do the Maldives” can become as performative as doing the Maldives. The person who books Mozambique specifically to mention it at brunch has not solved the problem. They have just changed the currency.
The question was never about the destination.
The question is whether the choice was yours.
I know a family in Mumbai — old money, serious travellers, the kind of people who have been everywhere and perform none of it. Last summer they went back to the Maldives for the fourth time. Same resort. Same villa. I asked the mother why. She said: “Because my daughter asks for it by name. Because my husband sleeps there in a way he does not sleep anywhere else. Because I have read every book I have been meaning to read on that deck.”
That is a choice. A real one. Made for private reasons that have nothing to do with anyone else’s opinion, including mine.
The most luxurious thing you can do this summer is not go somewhere new.
It is go somewhere you chose.
Nico Almeida writes Takeoff, Not for Everyone, and the pieces your travel advisor wishes you hadn’t read for World Travel Magazine. He has opinions. He is not sorry. ◼
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© This article was first published online in May 2026 – World Travel Magazine.
