Writing on Maldives tourism, trade and the business of building things in the Indian Ocean — argued from the numbers, with every figure sourced.
A resort knew exactly where its outdoor umbrellas failed and exactly how to fix them. None of it reached the specification. The knowledge that decides whether a thing lasts on a Maldivian island already exists, inside these companies, and almost none of it is written down.
October 2026 · 5 min read
The men who built the first resort made everything by hand, because it was all they could afford. We call that sustainable now. It also meant quarrying the reef. Today we have the vocabulary, the certificates and people working seriously at it, and it's worth asking whether we understand what survives on an island as well as they did.
October 2026 · 6 min read
Somebody had put a Boeing 777 on the route weeks earlier. Markets here do not arrive on their own — they are built, by people and companies whose work almost never appears in the arrivals figures, and occasionally the statistics are clear enough to say whose.
October 2026 · 6 min read
One aeroplane, once a week, from one Australian city, sold by one company. It is the one market whose growth this year I can point at and explain, and the odd part is how much of it we already had before the flight took off.
October 2026 · 7 min read
SriLankan Airlines used to fly a loop joining Colombo, Tokyo and Malé, so a Japanese traveller reached this country without changing aircraft. The Malé leg came out six years ago. Japan was one visitor in ten here in the late 1990s and is one in sixty-five now, and I went looking for which of those facts explains the other.
October 2026 · 6 min read
In 2010 there were 22 guest houses in the Maldives. At the end of 2025 there were 973, and one tourist bed in four now sits on an island where people live. But guest houses take about 2% of the money and three of every five of their beds are empty on an average night. For National Tourism Day, the question every island should be asking itself.
October 2026 · 9 min read
The project
3 articles
The project
7 articles
The project
2 articles
The project
1 article
The project
1 article
The series
10 parts
Also
2 articles