Rahaa Resort Maldives

Good food Resort is new, large room, comfortable bed, nice bathroom, terrace with sofa Daily free snorkeling excursions, water sports staff is nice However: Not much of a beach, except in front of the bar; beach is in the shadow in the afternoon. Weak wifi. Lots of corals that hurt the feet, shoes are necessary, seaweed in the afternoon (see pictures). Unsuitable for swimming: shallow water - ankle-deep at low tide and waist-deep at high tide. There is a manmade swimming channel in front of the bar, quite limited. Therefore, the only snorkeling possible is through an excursion. We tried swimming in the lake, but the water is very warm there, it’s like swimming in a bathtub and in addition the water is dirty (see pictures). There is a pipe bringing the sewage of the hotel to the open ocean from behind the port, you can even see it on the satellite if you look closely. Depending on tide/current, this water comes back into the lake. Apart from lack of beach/swimming, the worst was the transfer issues and the complete disregard of customers.

We came from another hotel nearby that had booked our internal flights. So Rahaa charged us “only” for the boat transfer from/to the airport (that was by the way more than 200 USD per person). Upon arrival, they wanted us to pay the balance, having already charged the credit card for approximately half the amount. No proforma/information invoice was provided, only an amount that we had to pay. We declined to pay until we had the detail. Later they sent a table via WhatsApp that was not giving any details. After a lot of discussions (wasting our holiday time!!), they provided a more detailed table, that was wrong by several hundred dollars since they were counting the plane tickets, that they didn’t book! After complaining, they finally amended the total. However, they never provided a proper invoice, when leaving they still gave us an “information invoice”. Even though our internal flight returning to Male was in the afternoon, Rahaa insisted that they put us on the boat to the airport at 6 o’clock in the morning. We had booked a hotel in Male precisely to avoid such early rising before our long flight back home. Rahaa said it’s a shared boat transfer, basically they didn’t want to run the boat for 2 people only, even though they charged us 200 USD for it. They are saving money at the expense of the customers wellbeing; they didn’t care at all and the only solution they offered was to pay extra for a boat. (If you read the other reviews, they book people on the early morning domestic flights even though their international flight is in the evening, probably the morning flight is cheaper.) As a result, after getting up at 5 in the morning for no reason, we spent 7 hours at the domestic airport and we were very tired the whole day. Holidays spoiled. This was our sixth time in the Maldives, we have stayed at a range of accommodations, from 4 and 5-stars to small hotels on the local islands, these were all good experiences. Rahaa is absolutely the worst!!