The 360 House Reef Rating

Scored on the evidence, not the brochure.

A house reef is the difference between snorkelling from your steps and booking a boat every time you want to see a turtle. Brochures never mention it. We score every island we sell out of five, on how far you swim to reach live coral, what is actually there, whether the current lets a nervous swimmer in, and how much of the reef survived the last bleaching.

Scores last reviewed August 2026. Reefs change. If ours is out of date, tell us and we will look into it and correct it.

What we score on

DistanceHow far you swim from the beach or your steps before you reach live coral.
What is thereCoral cover and fish life, not the marketing photograph taken in 2016.
Entry and currentWhether a nervous swimmer can get in and back out without a guide.
BleachingHow much of the reef came back after the last bleaching event.

The scale

  1. 5Exceptional. Live coral within swimming distance of the beach, reliably good fish life, safe entry.
  2. 4Strong. Worth choosing the resort for. One or two caveats on entry point or current.
  3. 3Fine. You will enjoy it. You would not cross an atoll for it.
  4. 2Thin. Little or nothing to snorkel off the beach. Some of these islands run a free boat to a reef; we will tell you which.
  5. 1None to speak of. Beautiful island. Bring a book.

These are our scores, not the resort's. A resort can be excellent and score a 2 here, and we still sell it happily to people who came for the villa and the dining rather than the snorkelling. The number tells you one thing only: what the swimming off the beach is actually like.

How these scores are made

These scores are compiled at a desk, not in the water. For every island we read the guest record, the snorkelling and diving reviews, the forum threads written by people who have snorkelled fifty reefs, the independent trade reviews, and we weight the detailed accounts heavily and the enthusiastic one-liners at close to nothing. Where the reports contradict each other, we say so on the resort. Where an island has no reef, we say that too, including for islands we sell a lot of.

What that buys you is the experience of hundreds of guests rather than one visit on one week of one year. What it costs you is currency: reefs bleach and recover, and a review from 2022 describes a reef that may have changed. Treat a score as the start of a conversation about your dates, not a promise about the water on the morning you arrive.

Last reviewed August 2026. Thirty-six of our islands have been through the full review and carry a written note. The rest are marked provisional: the score comes from our own records but has not yet been checked against the guest record. If you have snorkelled one of these reefs recently and we have it wrong, tell us and we will change it.

Tell us the reef matters and we will shortlist around it

Send us your dates and budget and we will come back with three islands where you can snorkel from the beach, costed with transfers, rather than three islands with a good photographer.