I've been planning a Maldives trip for next year, and picking an island is exhausting. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of resorts that all look the same, and I've scrolled through so many XHS posts my brain is numb. So I just handed it to AI—had it scrape some data. Figured I shouldn't let those tokens go to waste, so I burned even more tokens building a little tool called islandmatch, sharing it with anyone else stuck in the same loop:
- Had AI compile info on 121 Maldives hotels (atoll location, transfer type, meal plan, kid age policies, etc.)
- Answer a few questions (budget range, whether you can handle a seaplane or only speedboat, kids' ages, what matters most to you)—takes about 2 minutes—and it gives you 3–5 matching resorts based on fixed rules, with reasons why. (Haven't hooked up an LLM to make it an AI chatbot yet—tokens feel too expensive.)
- If you already have a shortlist, skip the Q&A and just filter all the islands yourself on the "Discover" page by atoll/budget/transfer/experience
- No login, no booking or payment—just helps narrow things down from dozens to a handful
Link: islandmatch.zestworks.io (didn't buy a separate domain to save money)
Disclaimer: This is a little tool I made myself, not a commercial promotion—I just want to save other people who are also driven crazy by island-picking from some detours. The data is still being manually proofread. If you spot wrong info on an island, or think a resort should be included but isn't, or have any suggestions or bugs, drop a comment and I'll fix it. Thanks everyone!
