Bandos

Bandos Island Resort & Spa

island size is 178,900 square metres.
225 guest rooms.

Location 15 minutes speedboat ride from the Male’ International Airport and Male’ (capital of the Maldives).
Transportation Only 15 minutes (7 kilometres) power boat ride from Male’ International Airport.

info from their site:http://www.bandosmaldives.com/bandos/English/

some more historical info about the island from:http://www.maldiveisle.com/tourhistory.htm

Ibrahim Nasir the former president was a shareholder of Cresent Tourist Agency

>Bodu Bandos was developed as the second resort of the Maldives.
> former president, Mr Ibrahim Nasir, initiated the resort development project.
> Crescent Tourist Agency in which Mr Nasir had a stake implemented the project.
>The first phase of the construction involved the building of 32 rooms with two blocks of 10 rooms and six separate blocks of two rooms. The design conceptof two blocks of 10 rooms was not a favourite concept as these rooms were facing inland instead of towards the beach. However, the construction team soon realized the advantage of having beach front rooms in a leisure beach resort and increased the room numbers to 110, the rest being beach front bungalows.
>Local sand and corals were used as a major component in the construction.

>With 220 beds, Bandos Island Resort was opened on 10th December 1972. The resort had a restaurant, dive school and other facilities. On opening,
>it employed about 60 local people.
>Since tourism was a new experience to locals, there was hardly anyone who was experienced or trained in the management field. To overcome this problem and enhance smooth running of the resort, two Maldivian women were sent to Colombo, Sri Lanka to obtain training in the hotel and catering field.
> Bandos was also the first resort to provide an in-house decompression facility for diving accidents with its hi-tech ‘Decompression Chamber’.