[ad_1]
“Welcome to Subsix”, he boomed, “our totally distinctive underwater nightclub!” And the door swung open, theatrically, to disclose exactly no different patrons.
I shortly renamed the venue (in my head) “Suboptimal”; but it surely was solely slowly, and several other days later, that I realised this was the second that the Maldives had jumped the shark. Or, certainly, jumped on the shark, as a result of reef sharks are frequent there, and the identical resort additionally affords skydiving.
That phrase, “jumped the shark”, sums issues up completely right here although. It was initially coined within the TV trade, the place the present Joyful Days was deemed to have gotten too foolish, and too glutted by itself success, to proceed after a infamous episode wherein The Fonz water-skied up a ramp and over a marauding Nice White. So hold the shark, hold the water-skiing, and easily swap “Fonz” for “1.7 million vacationers yearly”, and the parallel suits completely.
That’s what number of international guests flock/flop right here in a typical 12-month interval, and the excellent news (if you happen to’re the finance director of a global lodge chain; much less so if you happen to’re a shark) is that vacationer numbers are already again to pre-pandemic proportions, and are rising even quicker than the ocean stage. From a standing begin in 1972, when the nation’s first resort opened – with no phone, and a shaky Morse Code contact with neighbour Sri Lanka as its solely hyperlink with the surface world – the Maldives this month celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of its tourism trade, with greater than 170 resorts now lining up their loungers for a share of its $3 billion annual revenues.
[ad_2]
Source link
