The Maldives is a fascinating country to travel to independently, not least because it’s only been possible to do so for the past decade. Now, guesthouses are springing up on local islands on a seemingly monthly basis, offering budget travellers an affordable way to explore this beautiful / paradise of a country.

And, in many ways, travelling on a budget in the Maldives is far superior to staying in one of the luxury resorts. Each resort is built on its own island, isolating you from the rest of the country so you never get a chance to experience local life. Staying on the local islands has given me the five senses, see, touch, feel, taste and hear the Maldives, that very few people have experienced so far.

But things are changing rapidly.

The number of guesthouses on some of the more popular islands are doubling each year as more and more travellers turn up in search of paradise on a budget. On one of the islands I visited, it seemed like I was the only tourist — I had every beach to myself! I suspect this won’t be as commonplace five years from now.

So, now is the perfect time to travel to the Maldives.

I spent a month and visited many of the local islands — Maafushi, Himmifushi etc..  I will on my next visit splurge a few nights on a resort stay at in an overwater bungalow so that I could experience the differences between the two ways of travelling. Need to save first:)

How much does it cost to travel the Maldives on a budget? As little as $50 a day. As a budget traveller, you can expect to spend $30 a day on a private room in a guesthouse; $10 a day on food; and $10 a day on activities. But there are, of course, ways to do it even cheaper.

I used Airbnb for all of my stays and not been disappointed yet!

Here’s everything you need to know about travelling in the Maldives on a budget.

Independent and Budget Travel is Very New to the Maldives

Tourism, in general, is relatively new to the Maldives. The first resort opened in 1973 and for thirty years, the only way to visit as a tourist was via these expensive island resorts.

Several years ago, the government changed its regulations to allow guesthouses to open on the local islands for the first time, tourists were allowed to stay with locals and gain an insight into Maldivian life. At present, many budget travellers remain unaware that it’s possible to do this.

Any downsides? At times, yes, of course, vast development sees growth but also environmental problems because of the infrastructure being poor, I saw especially on the more touristy islands, garbage being burnt, more plastic bottles floating in the harbour catchment areas and at times I felt like I was invading the islands against the locals’ wishes. I felt uneasy for the first few nights and I were regarded with suspicion — or perhaps curiosity, also my guesthouse on the island of Himmifushi, never locked the villa doors, as the host mentioned it would be ok, prevention in my eyes is now the major concern travelling, so the door became locked if I was there by myself! On some of the smaller islands, my greetings of “hello” towards the locals were mostly answered but many people just seemed busy in the passing of their day and just went about there business.

Having said all that, the majority of the locals were friendly and welcoming and happy to chat.

Horizontal palm trees on Maafushi

It Can Be Done Cheaply

The Maldives were always many dream honeymoons destination for a couple of reasons.

1. It looked like it had the best beaches in the world
2. The resorts were very expensive and indulgence seems to be the key!

I’d assumed that the Maldives was a once in a lifetime destination that I’d visit only for a very special occasion.

Not true! 

Finding Cheap Accommodation:

The first thing to note is that there aren’t any super cheap options for accommodation. You won’t find dorm rooms in the Maldives, or a crappy $5 a night bungalow on the beach like you would in Southeast Asia. You will, however, find several Couchsurfing hosts. Couchsurfing isn’t my game, even though I’ve done it and lived in some precarious positions throughout travelling, but if you’re up for spending nothing on accommodation, check that out first.

Aside from Couchsurfing, though, there are still plenty of budget guesthouses, and they’re surprisingly good value.

For $30-60 a night, you’ll receive a clean, modern, and spacious room with air conditioning, a hot shower, free breakfasts, snorkelling gear, a bottle of water each day, twice daily room cleaning, and fast Wi-Fi, ask for speed test before you book. The rooms are seriously nice, clean and where I lay my hat that’s my home! What’s more, I feel the Maldivian people have seen an opportunity and a sustainable life through tourism and will bend over backwards to help you.

My bookings/accommodation were around the £30 mark.. Good enough to rest this head.

Let tourandtakein give you £34 off your first trip on AirBnB

Airbnb offers many accommodation options on the local islands. There are over 300 guesthouses under $100 a night and 120 under $50 a night. A quick reminder that if you’ve never used Airbnb before, you can get up to £30 of your currency off on your first booking, through following out link with the tourandtakein Tribe.

A quick note: Don’t worry if the accommodation isn’t what you thought it was. Airbnb refund in certain cases and many places will adhere to your needs and if they don’t, there are more places, you won’t get stuck for a pillow for the night, this is a fast-growing sector and you can always skip to another island close by, it’s has cheap and convenient at times as booking a taxi.

Finding Cheap Transport: 

Transport is also cheap. Local ferries run on a somewhat infrequent schedule but shouldn’t cost more than $2-4 for a one to three-hour journey. I paid $2-$4 for the ferry from Male to Maafushi, ferry from Maafushi to Fulidhoo, Maafushi to Guraidhoo.

You can also get a speedboat from Male to the islands from $10 – $50 shared, as the local ferries don’t stop at the resort islands. .One possibility could be to turn up at the nearest local island and ask around to see if a local fisherman will take you across on his boat.

Avoid the seaplanes if you’re travelling on a budget — these will usually cost around $500 return for a 20- minute journey.

Finding Cheap Food: 

Food will set you back around $5-10 per meal, but with most guesthouses offer a free breakfast, so you can manage on snacks until paying for dinner. You can’t complain about spending $5 a day on food!

In general, the smaller the island, the fewer food options there are, and you’ll likely be eating at your guesthouse for most meals. On Fulidhoo, the smallest island, I heard they charged $10 per dinner whether we ordered chicken fried rice, curry and rice, or a gigantic fish barbecue. There were only three restaurants on the island and they all charged the same price — for the tourists, at least.

For a busy island, such as Maafushi, there were plenty of food options. There are maybe a dozen restaurants on the island, all offering reasonably priced dinners. I paid around $5-10 a meal for a spaghetti bolognese including a mango smoothie.

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Finding Cheap Excursions: 

The cheapest way to go on an excursion is to book it through your guesthouse. Don’t be afraid to shop around for prices, though! Wander into four or five guesthouses and ask for their prices before you make a decision. Also check to see what’s included in the price — some guesthouses will include lunch, water and a soft drink, some won’t include any extras.

I’m not a diver, even though I’ve my Padi but many of you expressed interest in knowing how you can dive in the Maldives on a budget. If you decide to dive through your guesthouse or arrange it through a dive shop on a local island, you’ll be looking at paying around $100 for two dives. The cheapest option for diving in the Maldives, however, is doing a liveaboard trip.

Other options for excursions include lots of snorkelling trips. If you’re lucky to be visiting during manta ray or whale shark season

Island hopping involves an awful lot of open ocean!

There’s So Little Information Around

I’ve never visited a country where independent travel is so new, it reminded me of my early days of travelling in Thailand and it certainly made planning a little more trickery, however with all the social media, apps now. You will get by!!

I’m a last-minute traveller for many reasons mainly working a and travelling can sometimes tire you out and a rest is needed longer in one place, so trying to choose between islands while having no idea what they were going to be like left me more than a little anxious. The first thing I do when I decide I want to go somewhere is head to Google Images.

Searching for detailed information is tricky though. Most of the islands had a paragraph on Wikipedia mentioning their size and population, and that was mostly it.

Update 2019: This is quickly changing as more and more travel bloggers get wind of how easy it is to travel the Maldives on a budget. Now, you should be able to find a few travel blog posts on various local islands that are within easy reach of Male.

Ferries Run Infrequently 

If you want to visit several islands while you’re in the Maldives, the ferries will be your biggest barrier. Ferries don’t run on Fridays, and typically run every other day to the main island of each atoll. There are also inter-atoll ferries, but the timetables aren’t online, and I’m not sure of their frequency.

Trying to get from one island to another can often involve multiple changes, and coordinating these travel days to coincide with the ferry timetable can leave you overnighting on other islands.

On a lot of the beaches, you’ll have to be fully covered up at all times

It’s a Strict Muslim Country

The Maldives is an Islamic state operating under sharia law, and requires all of its citizens to be Muslim. Upon entering the country, you have to sign a declaration stating that you are not bringing into the country “materials deemed contrary to Islam including ‘idols for worship’ and bibles, pork and pork products, and alcohol.”

Furthermore, in the Maldives, Friday and Saturday is the weekend, with Friday being a day of rest. Everything but restaurants close down on Fridays and ferries cease to run.

Pork and alcohol is banned, and there are also no dogs in the country. You won’t be able to find an alcoholic drink anywhere outside of the resorts. It’s not even like it’s banned but you can secretly buy it at expensive prices — I didn’t see it for sale anywhere and weren’t offered any while I was there. If you’re hoping for cocktails or beers at sunset, you’ll have to stick with a fruit smoothie instead.

So what should you wear on the local islands? 

For both females and males, there’s a strict dress code: shoulders and thighs to be covered at all times, even when on the beach. No see-through clothing, either. Guys, you won’t be able to go shirtless or wear shorts that expose your thighs, and females, you won’t be able to wear a bikini or swimming costume.

If you’re going on an excursion away from the local islands — a snorkelling trip, for example — then you can wear whatever you like once you get on the boat.

Heron on Bikini Beach.

There are Beaches Especially For Tourists

On some of the local islands, there’ll be one designated beach for the tourists, typically called Bikini Beach. A barrier will be erected between the beach and the streets of the island, and once you pass that barrier, you’ll be able to take off your clothes. Well, some of them. Topless sunbathing (for ladies) is illegal in the Maldives and could land you in jail.

Some of the guesthouses have a small garden area where they’ll allow you to sunbathe in bikinis if there isn’t a Bikini Beach. It’ll say in the listing if this is the case, so be sure to check in advance if sunbathing is important to you.

There was a beach for tourists on both Maafushi and Himmifushi.

Overwater Bungalows beautiful but @ a price!

Fancy a special trip to one of the fancy resorts while you’re in the country? Prepare to pay a lot of money. For a room on the beach, you’ll be looking at $200+ per night, for one of the beautiful overwater bungalows, you’ll struggle to find anything under $400.

The typical structure and colourful door on the local islands

Each Island is Different — And There Are So Many to Choose from!

Before arriving in the Maldives, I had naively assumed that each island would be pretty similar. I was wrong.

There are 1200 islands in the Maldives, 200 of them inhabited. Of the inhabited islands, you’ll find guesthouses on maybe 50 of them. You’ll also, as I keep saying, know very little about any of them. I was pleasantly surprised, then, to discover that each island I visited offered something different. The only thing they had in common: none of the streets were paved! Do though watch were you’re walking as many large stones can suddenly cut your feet in flipflops

Maldivian money

The Taxes and Fees are Horrible

The Maldivian government charge you a whole load of taxes and fees, and they’re a pain in the but to pay. For every night you spend in the Maldives, you’ll be looking at:

A bed tax. That’s per person per night.

8% GST for the room.

Service charge. I also don’t know why you’re paying a service charge to the government. Which has been mentioned! The service charge isn’t collected by the government but is a compulsory charge from service providers — accommodation, restaurants, etc. 

Guesthouse owners try to get you to pay this fee in US dollars. It’s frustrating and expensive, and you can’t pay in advance. That’s an issue because:

Running Out of Money is a Real Concern

The only ATMs in the country are in Male and I saw one in Maafushi, which makes paying for things on the local islands kind of frustrating. The UK has an annoying rule that you can only withdraw $350 per day from an ATM (Remember to inform your bank of your movements as they may block your card!)Happened to me twice and a real pain and panic!

t’s a good idea to book your accommodation in advance so that you can pay for it before you arrive. I do this via AirBnB most times

In restaurants, on the local ferries and in the local shops, everything has to be paid for in dollars or rufiyaa.

It’s also quite hard to get rufiyaa changed back into anything useful when you leave, and there are quite a few reports online saying that all of the currency exchange places in Male refused to change their currency back. Getting out lots of money in advance with the idea that you can just change back what you haven’t spent at the end of your time isn’t a great idea. I’d recommend bringing a few hundred US dollars into the country with you as a backup supply of cash.

It’s a Great Location for Digital Nomads

I was fully expecting to spend my travel in the Maldives offline due to unusable Internet and some days when moving to a new island, it did catch me out but most of the time there’s a solution. In Maafushi the signal was weak even though I had a Maldive sim data card, but Icom offer a service.

Getting a sim card in the Maldives is simple. It costs $10-$20 for the tourist sim card with data. We were shocked to discover that we received a data signal everywhere we went — even during a ferry ride across the open ocean where we couldn’t see land in any direction. I guess that’s what happens when there’s no tall buildings to diminish the signal.

Working and travelling in the Maldives is therefore easy. Wi-Fi speeds are faster than I’ve received in many guesthouses around the world, and data is very reliable. Just make sure you pick the right guesthouse and has mentioned ask them to do a speed check for you, before booking.

Maldivian hammocks

Maldivian Hammocks are Strange but Comfortable

And you’ll be spending a lot of time in them.

One of the first things I noticed when we arrived in the Maldives was the strange hammocks — I’d never seen anything like them. Made from a steel frame with netting sewed around the edge, you’ll find these uncomfortable-looking contraptions hanging from sturdy tree branches on the beach. You’ll even find ground-based ones outside of most houses.

They’re surprisingly comfortable.

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The Weather is Hard to Predict

Online, I read that the wettest month in the Maldives is September but the locals say it’s June/July. Either way, it’s pretty hard to predict the weather.

Each island has its own climate, so if it’s raining on one island, it won’t necessarily be raining on an another that’s 20 km away. Because of this, every weather forecast sticks to the standard rainy season prediction: Dry until 3pm, rain for the rest of the day.

The smaller the island, the harder it is to find a weather forecast online.

Low season means you can have this entire beach to yourself!

Construction everywhere!

It Won’t Be Like This Forever

The douchiest, most overused sentence in travel blogging? Yep. But in this case it’s true.

Let’s take Maafushi. Last year, there were 100 beds on the island. This year there are 500. Next year, there’ll be something like 1000. Seriously. They’re already building a big resort with 80 beds for the upcoming high season. The unbroken silence of the much smaller local islands no longer exists on Maafushi. Instead, there’s construction everywhere. You can wake up and go to sleep with the gentle sounds of banging and crashing as people worked on building guesthouses all day every day. Nothing like the Asian development noise central though.

I’m certain that the next time I return to the Maldives it’ll be unrecognisable from the quiet islands I experienced today.

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