Small resort with private man-made beach.

Movenpick is a fairly small resort with a fairly crowded swimming pool but a nice man-made beach. There are really only two restaurants with one being a buffet, but the entertainment at the Ibiza bar is nice for an evening.

Getting to the Movenpick is a breeze from Cebu-Mactan Airport, with it basically being a 15-minute journey by car. That means that if you are flying from Manila, it’ll take you an hour to fly down and then about 45 minutes to collect your baggage and get to the hotel.

Check-in was fairly smooth, although, with there only being 3 check-in desks, I can imagine that it gets crowded at times.

We stayed in an executive suite ocean room, which was nice and large and had two balconies. The rooms do look a little tired, to be honest, and don’t seem to have been refreshed a great deal since the hotel was “acquired” from being a Hilton. The main issue I had with this room was the odd decision to have glass doors into the bathroom and the fact that the curtains in the bedroom did not fully close, meaning that the 6 am light will wake you up in the morning. This room also gave us access to the executive lounge, which, whilst nothing overly special, did serve an excellent mini eggs benedict for morning breakfast.

The man-made beach is actually a decent size, with a lovely grass area behind it. Despite being a little bit rocky and pebbly, it is very pleasant. You can swim out about 70 meters or so and spot some nice marine wildlife, including a set of different fish and crabs, and the like.

We didn’t go in the swimming pool area as it was very crowded with families, but it looked to me like there was a lack of chairs/beds to sit on even if it wasn’t quite so busy.

There are effectively two restaurants in the resort, with one being inside the main building (The Sails), and one outside on what is effectively a pier (Ibiza). The Sails is your standard hotel buffet type restaurant that also has an ala carte menu. We had lunch here each day for our stay, and the food was of decent quality and enjoyable.

The Ibiza bar on the pier has a nice outside layout and offers evening entertainment in the form of a dance show. The food offered here is tapas and a Brazilian BBQ and is a nice place to sit and have a cocktail in the evening. My only gripe with this bar is that they allow non-hotel guests to reserve tables. This means that on a busy night, and even if you try to reserve a table in the afternoon, you’ll be told you cannot. When I pressed on this, I was told that only 50% of the reservations are for hotel guests, a ridiculous policy considering that there is absolutely nothing else to do in the hotel at night.

Check out was also relatively painless, but we had a major issue trying to get a taxi or hotel shuttle due to rain in the area. The taxi queue was about 50 people long, but since we were just moving 200m down the road, the hotel general manager (whose name I forget) gave us a ride in his car. A very nice touch that certainly went a long way.

I’d happily stay at the Movenpick again. I think the rooms are fine and the price is well within reason, I’d just go there during low season and probably still only stay for a couple of nights at most.