When I mentioned that I’d been to Maldives and I was going to write some blog posts about travelling there on a budget, I was met with a certain amount of incredulity. It seems to be very much seen as a country visited purely by luxury travellers looking for a honeymoon-like beach resort holiday, and therefore out of reach of the casual backpacker type. Including me, apparently.
Barefoot Backpacker life, by definition.
However, in March 2025, me and my friend Laura did just that. This is an overview on how we visited Maldives on a budget; if you want to know how the trip felt overall, here’s a link to my podcast episode all about it.
Maldives Budget Summary
The first thing we need to impress on you is that all our costs are based on two friends travelling together. So that means twin-bedded rooms in the hotels – which as an aside are relatively tricky to come by, because obviously there’s a vibe that Maldives is a place for couples. That said, no-one seemed to care that we were an unmarried woman and a(n administratively) man travelling together and sharing rooms. It also means there were times when we’d buy some things separately, or our meals were different prices. As best as I can, I’ve averaged out all these variances. In addition, all process are in GBP. This is because that’s the money we were changing from.
Hi, this is us, in the water, thinking how to take a good selfie for this blog post.
Overall, we averaged just under £53 per person per day for our stay in Maldives, covering accommodation, food, drink, and travel, though note that includes the Sunday morning where we did nothing more than go to the airport and have a snack. Excluding that, our average for the four days/nights we had works out at a little under £62 per person per day. It also excludes a purchase of swimming goggles Laura made at a shop in Malé (£22.56) on the grounds this was an extraneous item that not every traveller need make, so I’m not counting it in the budget calculation.
Budget Accommodation in Maldives
Unsurprisingly, hotel costs were the major expense, even despite us staying on one of the ‘local’ islands rather than in a resort. One of the things to bear in mind about Maldives is that the price of accommodation is increased by a series of taxes added to the price and payable on check-in, regardless of if you’ve pre-paid online for the actual hotel or not. And these aren’t small taxes either – our first hotel in Malé, the Marukab Plaza, cost a total of £117 for a twin room with breakfast, of which about £30 was extra taxes, including an ‘environment fee’ of £12. And this was for one night, remember.
The outside of our hotel on Gulhi Island.
The other two hotels we stayed in were a bit cheaper; the Sandy Heaven on Gulhi was just under £40/night in total, for a twin room with breakfast, and the Tour Inn back in Malé, which was £70/night for a twin room, though I don’t know if that included breakfast as we left far too early to have taken advantage of it anyway. You can tell the hotels in Malé were more expensive than the hotel on Gulhi – budget travellers might want to take that into account when they’re plotting a route. It’s likely you will need one night in Malé anyway based on your flights, unless you visit as a side-quest from Sri Lanka, where there seem to be regular flights throughout the day.
All these hotels were standard hotels which wouldn’t have felt out of place in any other town of equivalent size. This is the advantage of the local islands; they vibe like normal towns, with hotels and guesthouses on the street. That said, Maldives doesn’t have a backpacker hostel or equivalent; even Hostelworld only brings up a handful of B&Bs across only five of the islands (including only one on Maafushi, which costs twice as much as the hotel we stayed in on neighbouring Gulhi).
Our room inside the Marukab Plaza hotel in Malé.
As an aside, Maldives would be a fabulous place to just set up a tent and camp out on a beach, which would be the ultimate in budget travel, but sadly you’re not allowed to.
Eating on a budget in Maldives
In general, we found food costs to be pretty competitive in general; we didn’t feel meals on either Malé or Gulhi were overpriced or extortionate, and furthermore the food we had was of uniformly good quality.
Plate of rice. Simple but nice.
On Gulhi we ate both nights are the Dhilakani Café, a local backstreet café close to our hotel. Meals came to around £7.50 to £8 per person; this was for a main course and two drinks (fruit juice). There was a more touristy buffet-style restaurant down the street from our hotel which would have worked out at only a pound or two more.
On our first night in Malé, the street shawarma and drink we had was a shade under £5, while our Thai restaurant on the last night was heading towards £20 including a drink. I need to reiterate it was some of the nicest Thai food we’d had, but if you’re really wanting to keep to a strict budget you could just do another shawarma instead. And not time your meals to coincide with iftar during Ramadan. Aside from that, the coconut at the beach was £3.50, large bottles of water were under a quid, and airport food was surprisingly reasonable.
It was apparently a lovely coconut. I quite like the flowery decoration on it.
One thing we did notice about eating on a budget, specifically on Gulhi, was around seafood. Gulhi is very small, and flat with sandy soil, so very little really grows there. The main crops seem to be papaya and mango. But pretty much everything else needs to be imported, with the exception of fish. But while the Dhilakani Café had lots of meat and noodle and rice dishes, it was the seafood options that were consistently the most expensive, despite being able to walk out from the shore and literally pick up a fish in your hands within a couple of seconds. Now the fish looked huge and good quality, and definitely fresh, but for those on strict budgets, it’s something to be aware of.
Travelling on a budget in Maldives
Many of the islands have airports and there are regular flights between the atolls and Malé. To the resort islands there are also seaplanes, but if you’re on a strict budget, these won’t be on your radar. In addition, all the atolls are served by ferry. The majority of these ferries are actually speedboats operated by a variety of private companies, and their frequency depends on how close the island is to Malé. The closer islands, like Maafushi, have four or five a day, while more distant islands like Dharavandhoo may only have one or two. If times don’t align to your plans, there’s nothing stopping you from taking a speedboat privately, though at nearly $200 for a one-way trip even as short as to Maafushi, I’d again suggest these wouldn’t be on the radar for the average budget traveller. For some of the larger atolls there are also a series of government-operated ferries that are much cheaper ($5 to Gulhi and Maafushi, for instance) but they take much longer and might only run once a day. And not at all on Fridays.
Our boat between Malé and Gulhi.
And that’s definitely something to keep in mind when travelling around Maldives on a budget. If your trip coincides with a Friday, it’s likely you’ll be stuck on your chosen island for two nights. So that’s another good reason, as a budget traveller, to choose your island carefully, and make sure your hotel is affordable.
To really visit Maldives on a tight budget means taking advantage of these slow government-operated boats, but be aware their primary purpose is to serve the Maldivian population, and therefore operate in effect as commuter services to/from Malé, and generally only serve the islands with a significant local population. This means, for example, the service to Maafushi tends to go *to* Malé in the mornings and depart from Malé in the evenings. Unless you’ve timed your flights in/out the country to align with this, it means you end up having to spend the best part of two days of your trip in Malé itself, which, while a nice enough town, is probably not the reason you’re in the country in the first place.
We were restricted with our international flights being at the extreme ends of the day in the wrong direction, so we caught one of the regular speedboats both ways. It was $25 each for a one-way trip, which took 20 minutes, and it was reliable, timely, comfortable, and very pleasant.
The regular ferry shuttle, docked at Malé airport’s quayside
There are also regular ferries (every 10 minutes, except overnight when they reduce to every half hour) between Malé and the Airport; cost 15 MVD or just less than £1. Some hotels in Malé offer free airport transfers (the Makhtab Plaza did); others do not, so check accordingly. The only downside to these ferries is they only take cash, so make sure you have money on arrival.
How to save money visiting Maldives
In general, I’d say the biggest question with regard to travelling to Maldives on a budget is to decide to which island(s) you’re going. In terms of budget, travel and accommodation are synonymous, since your choice of island will be affected by what sort of accommodation you want, how much you’re prepared to pay to get there, and whether you want to journey between them or stay on one island for the duration. And this is important to bear in mind, because while there’s a lot of information out on the web about budget islands, often it doesn’t take into account the whole picture.
A series of palm trees along Gulhi’s SE shoreline
Case in point: one leading Maldives site suggests the island of Dharavandhoo as a budget destination. Which it might well be. However, it’s also nearly 120 km from the main international airport; you can catch a connecting flight for around £200 return or a speedboat (2 hours) for about $120 return. I know everyone travels on ‘a’ budget, but while the average visitor to Maldives might well accept that additional cost as ‘just an inevitability of travelling in Maldives’, the purpose of this pod is to suggest ways of visiting that don’t involve spending excess amounts of money on a 30 minute flight you don’t need, between two islands in the country with the lowest average elevation on the planet. But that’s another story.
This is why we chose to visit Gulhi – it was close enough to Malé to not require expensive transfers, and it was also a ‘local’ island rather than a resort island so we knew we’d be paying a more standard price for things rather than a resort markup.
Gulhi beach as seen from a few metres out into the water.
One thing to note is that while on Gulhi we could have taken any number of excursions out to other islands (including resort islands), to sandbanks, go on village or fishing tours, or hired jet-skis for half or hour or so. All of this is extra cost which we didn’t do – many of the excursions were priced at between $70 and $200. Here, we saved a lot of money on our trip by simply spending time on the beach and not doing much else – sun-lounger hire cost £27 for two people for three days’ worth of sun-lounger time, so that’s £4.50 per person per day. Your mileage may vary on whether that means we missed out on experiences, but that was our budget choice to do so.
Clearly though, taking our expenditure as a baseline, you can save quite a bit more if you scaled down a bit more – taking the government boats, spending less time in Malé, eating in local cafés more – but you’d be hard-pushed to save much money on the accommodation to be honest. That said, at an absolute minimum, you could probably take a trip to Maldives with a friend and spend about £40 per person per day. It just mightn’t be terribly enjoyable. I’d say though you definitely couldn’t do this as a solo traveller – prices tend to be per room rather than per person and if you’re only one person they won’t knock too much off the price.
One might also argue in fact that while you can travel Maldives on a strict budget, why would you? For instance, while of course everyone thinks of Maldives as being a place of expensive exclusive resorts, note that if the hotels in Malé are pushing £80-£100/night, you can get deals pretty easily for island resorts close to Malé for not much more than double that, and if you’re the sort of person who’s contemplating going to Maldives, it’s likely you’re not a dirt-cheap backpacker anyway. We only noticed this after we got back home, I may add.
One of the resort islands we passed on the way to Gulhi. Looks quite luxurious.
In summary though, my first tip when thinking about a budget trip to Maldives is: take a map, draw a small circle around Malé, and stay within that circle.
Using money in Maldives
I think I also should say a little bit about money itself in the Maldives. The official currency is the Maldivian Rufiyaa, but while not fixed to the US Dollar it is loosely tied to it. That, plus the reliance on the tourism economy, means that many prices are also quoted in US Dollars, and indeed often, certainly on the resort islands, you can even pay in Dollars. You just might get Rufiyaa in exchange. That said, if you’re reading this blog, you’re not necessarily going to be the sort of person who is just going to seaplane off to an exclusive resort.
In addition, there are ATMs which dispense Dollars should you prefer to do that. Note that Rufiyaa is one of those currencies that’s almost impossible to exchange outside the country, so their use of Dollars could be a benefit to many. That said, on the local islands and in the smaller shops and restaurants in Malé, Rufiyaa is very much the preferred currency, and in cash too, so unless your holiday is entirely at a resort, you’ll still need it – hence why it’s really useful to stay on an island with an ATM. Just be wary of the admin fees for using them – there’s a balance to be had between having too little money and keep having to use the ATM, and having too much money and not be able to spend it. That all said, card payments are accepted pretty much everywhere in Malé, on the resort islands, and at hotels on the local islands.