Facts about order to close spas

• It doesn’t hold water legally according to former attorney general and renowned lawyer Husnu Suood. A spa or any place of legal business can be ordered to stop their business if evidence was discovered which implicates criminal intent. However closing all such businesses for the crime of one establishment is beyond comprehension.
• No resort has complied thankfully and hoteliers are aware about the political nature of the dictate The government’s line that this was a measure they are taking to address the demand of the big-demo on 23rd December 2011 is also not consistent as no similar dictate has been issued to remove the commemorative idols and statutes of the SAARC summit in Addu.
• One of the five demands of the big demo protesters was to close places of prostitution in Male’ which goes by names such as ‘spas’ , ‘beauty saloons’ , ‘ayuverdha clinics’ etc. There was no mention of high end spas in resorts.
• Tourism minister Zulfa’s assertion that spa’s will be reopened once the people support moderate Islam is also inconsistent with her mandate. This presupposition of people’s belief shall not be normal subject matter for a minister to decide. Peoples belief are their own and the fact is that the paranoia about Islamic extremism has been blown out of all proportions for political reasons.

Maldives tourism rebranded

It used to be the sunny side of life and now its always natural. Not that it used to be unnatural bytheway .

old sunny-side-of-life logo

The brand change has been on official minds for quite some time and the first slogan that came to mind was “value for money”. As soon as our tourism minister, Dr. Zulfa came with this idea, it was torpedoed by various big-shots of tourism industry across the board, as the slogan seems to down-sell our tourism product. Since then, the search for a better slogan and logo had gone on and ultimately the winning slogan and logo was conjured up by a ‘QUO KEEN’ of Bangkok and London’.

the new always natural logo

Re-branding is the creation of a new name, term, symbol, design, or a combination of them for an established brand with the intention of developing a differentiated (new) position in the mind of stakeholders and competitors. Re-branding could be done for various reasons such as the need to shed a negative image,or to differentiate from competitors. In our case, its more like that somebody somewhere up in the ministry just got bored at staring up at the old sunny side of Maldives logo and vowed to change it at whatever costs! Anyways, the final product is good and thanks to wherever it is due. However we would like to note that our key tourism indicators still look good and keeps getting better.

Below is a comparison of key tourism indicators as a percentage over 2010. The only indicator that has gone south is the average stay duration which could account for the Chinese tourists who opt for shorter stays.

key tourism indicators of 2011

Ps: A heated thread in Minivan on this issue provides a lot of background on the issue.