“What color are those clouds?” I ask my companion as we bob in the large sunken pool on our private deck, long enough to cross in seven swipes of front crawl. The sun is sinking beneath the sapphire seas of the Indian Ocean, the last gasps of daylight painting the skies in countless hues. “White,” she tells me. “A little grey, maybe.”
Through my EnChroma sunglasses—which, along with a box containing four other styles, appeared silently and without fanfare atop a turquoise cabinet in my overwater villa on the third day of my stay—the cumulus puffs radiate pink, peach, and blush. It’s like viewing the world through rose-tinted spectacles. “They look like cotton candy to me,” I reply, pulling the shades off my head and setting the frames on the bridge of her nose. Like one in 12 men, I have color vision deficiency, which means I don’t perceive reds and greens as vividly as most people. Only one in 200 women is affected by color blindness, and my companion isn’t one of them.
It makes sense for an island destination like Finolhu to want to guests to see the resort with the vibrance filter turned all the way up to 100. The German-owned Seaside Collection acquired, renovated, and relaunched the property in November 2020, slathering it in an endless palette of colors. Where many properties in the Maldives consist of an endless stretch of aquamarine, punctuated by golden atolls and dark wood villas, Finolhu pops. A sculpture in fractals of colored glass greets visitors from the landing jetty, while a thousand strands of dangling rope in varying hues make up an art installation at the Beach Club restaurant. Multicoloured rattan lampshades hang above hot-pink scatter cushions and the pool area positively hums with neon blues.
Finolhu has partnered with EnChroma to improve and expand the range of visible colors for people with red-green color blindness.
It’s perhaps for this reason that Finolhu has partnered with EnChroma, a company that makes glasses with lenses that, they claim, improve and expand the range of visible colors for people with red-green color blindness. Finolhu loans EnChroma sunglasses and snorkel masks to colour-blind guests. The resort is in one of the most vibrant regions of the Maldives: the Baa Atoll is a UNESCO-listed Biosphere Reserve, supporting the seventh largest coral reef on Earth, more than 250 types of colourful corals, and around 1,200 polychromatic species of fish.
The EnChroma lenses are not sturdy enough to withstand the pressures of scuba diving, so I use it exclusively to snorkel the impressive house reef. For scuba, I use my own trusty Seadive TrueColor-HD mask, which corrects for the reds lost at depth with a rose-colored filter. The cyan seas teem with striped angelfish,
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Few things in life are better than getting a great gift from someone you care about — especially when it's the gift of travel. Travel is a gift that keeps on giving and lasts way longer than expensive skin care products or kitchen gadgets that end up untouched in a random drawer. In fact, a recent survey from Hyatt found that 85% of consumers would rather receive a trip or vacation than a physical gift this holiday season.
India is firmly in the sights of a rapidly expanding Saudi low-cost airline. Flyadeal has ambitious plans to more than double the size of its fleet during the next four years. This will see it transform from a largely domestic airline to one with much greater international connectivity.
United Airlines has brought back its popular discount for college-aged travelers — offering generous savings on select flights to Europe and India with no blackout dates.
The third annual Skift Global Forum East will bring several travel executives to Dubai this week to discuss the state of the industry in the region. What are the major trends in the Middle East’s travel industry?
Goa is not getting enough foreign tourists: Official Goa Tourism figures show that foreign arrivals in 2023 weren’t even half of 2019 levels: Just 450,000 visitors versus 937,000.
“I first came to Rajasthan around 2012 and completely fell in love with the people, the way of life, and the colors,” says the English fashion designer Kim Jones, who has remained captivated by the indigos, shocking pinks, and oranges of the Indian state ever since. “I've always had a fascination with heritage craft, and that first trip inspired a love of Indian textiles and embroideries.” For Jones, sources of such inspiration extend to Rajasthani architecture—the palaces and the people who built them—as well as a wider “innate sense of style” found across India, “mixing utility, formality, and immaculate tailoring.” After a string of return trips, Jones found that hints of those design sensibilities and meticulous attention to detail had trickled down into his own work—accessories in particular, in which he says “the intricacy of maharaja style is reimagined into a modern graphic look.” Here, Jones shares the places he never leaves off his itinerary, including the spot for regional dishes like murgh tikka, his favorite market to source tie-dyed textiles, and a tented camp in the wilderness.
The Skift Aviation Forum this week will feature several airline industry executives discussing the sector’s future and its most pressing issues. So it’s a good time to ask: What are the biggest challenges for the airline industry?
In the now faded photo: my mum, demure in an off-white, gold-trimmed sari, hands half-hidden in a swirl of henna; my dad, suit wrinkled, sporting Jackie O sunglasses borrowed from my auntie to block out the Mombasa sun. It's August 4, 1973, their wedding day. I stand in the same spot 50 years later, under the whitewashed arches of Tamarind, then and now “the best seafood restaurant on the whole coast of Kenya,” Mohamed, my taxi driver, tells me categorically. The views from here have not changed much in the last half century. Across the glinting blue of the creek, on Mombasa Island, colonial mansions hide behind a tangle of trees, and the boxy flat-roofed buildings of Old Town, discolored by the salt-laden Indian Ocean air, press up intimately against each other. Wood fishing boats bob in quiet inlets where my parents once spent weekends learning to water-ski.