Supply
Contract direct, always.
Resort Life buys from the resorts themselves rather than resting on a bed bank. It is the slower way to build a business and it is the reason the rates and the relationships hold.
Malé · 2006
The arrivals hall.
Every Maldivian holiday begins in the same room: the arrivals hall at Velana International, where a guest walks out of customs and looks for someone holding their name. In 2006 that someone was often Shaaz Waleed himself.
Resort Life Travel began as an inbound operator — the unglamorous, indispensable middle of the industry. A destination management company does not own islands. It earns the right to sell them, one contract at a time, by being the partner a resort trusts to move a guest from an aeroplane to a seaplane to a villa without a single thing going wrong. That trust is slow to build and quick to lose, and it is the only asset the business really has.
He built it in the least fashionable way available: directly. Rather than reselling a bed bank's inventory, Resort Life contracted with the resorts themselves. Rather than running everything out of Malé, he put people in the markets the guests were flying from — Kyiv and Mumbai first, then Dubai, Valencia, Milton Keynes and Moscow. Six offices now, and still a Resort Life counter at the airport where it started.
