Family holidays to Australia
There is a particular silence that falls over a seaplane full of parents when the pilot takes his shoes off. Ours did, somewhere over the Indian Ocean, and my five year old declared it the best plane she had ever […]
There is a particular silence that falls over a seaplane full of parents when the pilot takes his shoes off. Ours did, somewhere over the Indian Ocean, and my five year old declared it the best plane she had ever been on. She was not wrong.
The Maldives has spent two decades selling itself as the place you go without your children. Adults-only villas, whispering butlers, sunsets you are meant to watch in silence. So the idea of arriving with a buggy and a bag of half-eaten rice cakes feels almost transgressive. It should not. The islands that get families right do it better than almost anywhere else on earth, and once you know which ones they are, the rest of the trip falls into place.
The flight is the hard part, and then it is easy
Let us be honest about the journey, because no one else is. It is long. From London you are looking at ten to eleven hours to Malé, then a seaplane or a speedboat to the island itself. With small children that final hop is either the magic bit or the meltdown bit, and which one you get depends almost entirely on timing it against naps rather than against the resort’s transfer schedule.
Once you land, though, the thing that makes the Maldives exhausting for a family everywhere else, the getting around, simply disappears. Your island is a fifteen minute walk end to end. There are no roads, no car seats, no arguments about whose turn it is to sit in the front. The kids are given bikes on day one and you barely see them driving again.
By the third morning my eldest had learned the reef better than the marine biologist, and was correcting him on the difference between a blacktip and a whitetip.
What actually keeps children happy
The marketing photographs sell you the overwater villa. The thing that saves your holiday is the kids’ club, and they are not all created equal. The good ones are run by people who plan around the reef and the tide, not around a laminated timetable, and they will happily take a child for a morning of turtle spotting so you can lie very still on a lounger and remember who you were before car seats.
Food is the other quiet make-or-break. A resort that only does degustation menus at eight in the evening is a resort that has not met a hungry six year old at half past five. The islands worth booking have a proper all-day option, ideally a buffet the children can graze, and staff who bring the pasta out first without being asked twice.
Three islands that get families right
Would we go back
In a heartbeat, and sooner than is sensible. The Maldives with children is not the compromise everyone warns you it will be. It is the rare trip where the thing that is good for them, days in the water, no screens, early nights, is also the thing that is good for you. You just have to pick the right island, and forgive the flight.
