Matinloc Island Resort

Matinloc Island Resort is a perfect retreat after spending a few nights in El Nido town. The boat ride to get to the hotel is only 15 minutes. The staff is wonderful! They are very helpful for everything. The food options were good, but limited. The spa (massage + head massage) was wonderful! There are some ants and very few TV channels. The beach is beautiful and the room was clean. The staff really made the place special though.

So I don’t normally write reviews, but this hotel was so shocking I feel like I need to say something. I’ll start off with the good points: 1. The water is pretty. 2. The regular staff are very nice. The bad points: 1. The location is awful. They do not make it easy to leave or do anything. They offer a free boat ride for all arrivals and departures. Anyone who wants to leave the island can join this boat ride for 1,000 pesos (but be careful because the staff will not emphasize the fact that it is only this price one way and that it’s per person. So it’s actually 2,000 pesos). If there are no boats for arrivals or departures, then you must pay 9,000 pesos one way. 2. The activities they offer are astronomically more expensive than on the main island. We wanted to go island hopping. On the main island, the group tours are about 1,500 pesos and the private tours can be negotiated down to 7,500 pesos. The island of the hotel offers group tours for around 3,000 pesos (which is only if they have more than 8 people signed up—in our case, there were not even 8 people on the island so that was out of the question). The cheapest private tours for island hopping are about 16,000 pesos. The crazy part is that the hotel is right next to the blue lagoon so they could at least offer more reasonable prices. Side note: these two factors forced us to leave a day early because what was offered on the main island was still significantly cheaper than what the hotel offered. 3. We overheard the director of the hotel screaming into the phone very aggressively and unprofessionally. 4. Our toilet did not work and it overflowed. The staff did not manage to fix it or really tried to fix it. 6. The food is not good at all—which is not surprising as I’m assuming they only had one chef cooking the food since it always took forever to arrive. 7. The wifi was not good. 8. The first room we went to smelled like mold so we had to move to another room which smelled better.