An oasis amongst the urban chaos.

The Edsa Shangri-La is not the newest hotel in Manila and its location isn’t prime, but it offers the perfect place for a staycation with a literal oasis of the swimming pool and trees amongst the hustle and bustle of Ortigas. I have stayed in this hotel more times than I count and have never had a bad experience, although only just got around to reviewing it now.

If you are flying into Manila and are staying at the Edsa Shangri-La, then chances are you either know someone in the area or you are coming on business. The hotel is about a 30-minute drive from NAIA airport with no traffic and closer to a 1-hour 30-minute drive with traffic on a rainy Friday night. The hotel is flanked by two malls: the Shangri-La mall that the hotel connects to via walkway, and the SM MegaMall, a short 3-minute walk from the hotel lobby. Outside of the two malls, there really isn’t a lot in the area, with Ortigas being the old business district with most modern businesses and hotels being in the Makati and Manila bay area.

Hotel check-in is usually very swift, I don’t seem to recall a time when I have had to wait more than a minute or two to have my details taken. Of course, the check-in staff processes everything very quickly and you will have your room key before you know it.

The hotel reception is very grand, nice and open with large chandeliers hanging from the ceiling with the 24-hour hotel bar stretching across the back of the reception building. There are two wings to the hotel, but after being refurbished a year or two ago, there isn’t too much difference between the rooms.

The rooms themselves are an ok size. Far from the largest that the most recently built Manila hotels are now offering, but certainly not small enough to complain about. Despite the hotel being fairly old, the rooms have had a refresh and for the most part, are in good condition and don’t look overly tired.

The absolute gem at this hotel for me, and why it is perfect for a staycation, is the pool area — which, in my opinion, is the best hotel pool in Manila besides the sprawling Sofitel at the bay. The pool is nice and large with an entirely separate kids pool off to the far side so that those with families don’t bother those without. The pool bar has ample seating and some TVs, which makes it perfect to just chill out and have a beer. But be warned that they close infuriatingly early at around 10 pm on a weekday and 11 pm on a weekend. The staff will, thankfully, allow you to order some drinks and sit out after the bar has closed should you wish to chill to the early hours of the morning. The pool bar menu is as you would expect and also offering a selection of pizzas that are cooked in the oven right there in front of you in the pizza oven. What also makes this pool area feel like a real oasis is the plant life and trees, which are so very welcomed in this concrete grey area of town — but that also comes with a lot of mosquitos! Be very sure you bring mosquito repellent with you if you plan to sit outside after dark.

The hotel houses four restaurants excluding the pool bar. Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and the standard hotel buffet restaurant are all present — if memory serves me correctly. As you would well expect from a Shangri-La, the service is impeccable and the quality of food, no matter your choice of cuisine, is high.

Check-out is usually fairly straightforward, but be sure to pre-book a hotel car if you are traveling back to the airport as the local taxis don’t come into the hotel lobby too often, and even if they do you’d probably not want to take one all that distance.

If they just opened the bar area a little later each evening, then I don’t think I would ever leave.

Perfect location on the beachfront, right in the middle of Station 2.

It feels a little weird writing a review for a hotel and an area that isn’t going to see any tourists for 5 months, but The District is a pleasurable little hotel in a very good location that allows you to see the best (and worst) of Boracay beach.

Flying into Boracay usually means landing at Caticlan or Kalibo. The latter will take you a good 1hr or so by car to get to the ferry port with the former only being about 5 minutes. If you booked directly with The District, then they will have provided someone to meet you at the airport and transfer you to the private boat which will take you across to Boracay island. The boat ride is a pleasant 5 minutes and once you land on Boracay, it is a 10-minute car ride to the hotel.

The hotel is located in Station 2, about right in the middle actually, which means you can turn left out of the hotel at night to head towards the livelier bars, or right in the day time towards Station 1 for a more serene experience. The hotel also has its own set of beach beds, but they are only allowed 1 row so it’s limited to about 10 beds in total for the entire hotel.

Check-in to the hotel was a little less swift than I had hoped, with lots of instructions about things you can and can’t do, papers to sign, information to be given, and such, but not out of the norm for Filipino resort hotels. The rooms were a fairly decent size with a nice balcony that looked over the thin but lengthy pool. The bathroom area of the rooms was a little cramped, with almost no privacy, but the shower was nice and powerful, and everything was clean.

The restaurant area where you had the buffet breakfast was nice enough, a little small but the food on offer was your standard Western affair with a little bit of Asian. Above the restaurant is a nice rooftop bar, but it was very sterile with a single member of staff taking your order and then having to run up and down the stairs to fulfill it. One night, we had ordered drinks before going out to eat yet ended up leaving 20 minutes later before they arrived due to the slow service and issues of only having one staff member and many flights of stairs.

Check-out was painless with the exact same process of getting to the local airport as coming from it.

All in all, a nice little hotel, with decent enough rooms, but nothing that is jaw-dropping. Fine for a few nights of partying in Boracay.

Large spacious rooms, decent hotel location.

Good location close to the airport and a huge mall, the rooms are nice and spacious, the hotel reception is a little baron and sterile though.

If you are coming to the Conrad from NAIA, then you can expect the travel time to only take about 10 minutes with no traffic and about 25 minutes with, thanks to the recently opened NAIA Expressway. Right next to the hotel is a huge mall called The Mall of Asia. Here you can find lots of Filipino and Western-style restaurants inside the Mall, and a huge entertainment complex just outside. A selection of the more common Filipino style resto-bars can be found in the bay area opposite the hotel, which is a nice walk in the evening with many bars often hosting live bands whilst watching the sunset. You can also take a quick 5-minute cab ride at night to one of the numerous hotels and casinos further down the bay area.

Check-in to the hotel is fairly painless. There is a large albeit empty “welcoming area” whereby you need to take an elevator up one floor to get to the actual reception area. There are a good 5 or 6 desks and the actual check-in process was quick and professional as you would expect from a Hilton branded hotel.

The hotel is huge. By total room square footage, it must be one of the largest hotels I have stayed in. Taking the elevator up to the room then meant a good 3-4 minute walk past hundreds of rooms to get to my own. Honestly, if you are meeting friends in the bar downstairs, give yourself 5 minutes walking time to get from your room. Just before I checked out, I think I worked out that I could have saved a minute or so by taking a different elevator and cutting back across the hotel reception floor, but the initial point stands.

I stayed in a king one-bedroom suite as I was attending a conference and got it at a preferable rate. The room itself was very nicely laid out, divided into a living area, bedroom area, huge walk-in wardrobe, and a very large bathroom with a deep bathtub. Seriously, you put your phone down somewhere, and then you spend the next 10 minutes walking around trying to find it again. There were some nice welcome chocolates and fruits in the living room when I arrived, which were soon taken care of.

As mentioned, the bathroom has a very deep tub, two sinks, a TV, and a very powerful shower which is excellent for waking you up in the morning.

The conference was hosted well by the hotel, very professional, decent food, and the drinks in the bar area where you could sit outside were also quite relaxing after a hard day.

The only downside to the hotel is that it is very sparse without seemingly much to do. I don’t think you’d find yourself staying inside the actual hotel very often besides a quick drink at the bar and sleeping in your room — that obviously doesn’t matter much if you are happy to go to the nearby restaurants at the Mall. I’d say more of a hotel for business travelers like myself.

Second stay, still a great little hotel.

I wrote a large review of Ovolo Central back in 2017, so this one is just to say that the hotel is still in a great location, the rooms are still nice and spacious, and the staff is still really helpful.

The only issue I had was that the doors to the rooms need a hinge to slow them as they close. The people in the room next to me would be in and out of their room multiple times early in the morning, and all I could hear was the door slamming over and over again and due to the way the doors are situated next to each other. The sound really does travel right through into your room and wake you up.

Other than that, everything was great again.

Nice location on the Brayford quay, good size rooms.

This is the fourth time I have stayed at the DoubleTree. So as you read, consider this review an amalgamation of them all.

The DoubleTree is in a great location on the Brayford waterfront and just a 10-minute walk to the shopping town centre. A further 15 minutes or so walk up Steep Hill (it is called that for a reason, don’t make any mistake of that!) will find you in the Historic area of Lincoln and effectively in the grounds of the Cathedral and the Castle.

If you are coming into Lincoln by train, then the DoubleTree is about a 10-minute walk from the newly renovated train station. If you are coming by car, then there is usually ample parking on the Hotel grounds after you drive through the Brayford walking area to check-in.

Check-in is generally pretty quick, but the desks are manned by only two or three attendants. In busy periods, this can mean you are waiting, and if you have heavy luggage, then there is no help at all in getting it up to your room. If you have checked into a Hilton hotel before, you will know of the warm cookie waiting for you at arrival which is a welcome touch.

The hotel has recently been renovated with them adding an extra wing full of rooms. The old rooms were mostly fine, but the old bathrooms could be annoying for two reasons.

1. The shower was generally pathetic, and
2. There was so little ventilation in the bathroom that it would soon fill with steam.

On two occasions, I have mistakenly set off the fire alarm in the room with steam from the showers. Thankfully, the new rooms have much better bathrooms (although the shower still needs more power) and I feel that the fixtures in the room make better use of the room space. Unless you are at the front of the building, none of the rooms have a particularly great view, with most of them just facing out into the car park. It is also worth noting that the curtains do not fit flush to the wall, so if you are facing the sunrise, then expect to be woken up quite early.

As mentioned above, the location of the hotel is great. The Brayford is a quayside that houses a large selection of restaurants and bars ranging from the always-packed Nandos to the floating Wagamamas. Right next to the DoubleTree is a Holiday Inn, which has a sports bar showing all Premier League games and is open until about 11 pm. Down past the row of restaurants and bars is the Cinema, if you wish to catch a flick. Walking into town to the main Lincoln shopping area is a breeze, and as I also mentioned, getting up to the lovely historic part of Lincoln from the hotel will take you about 25/30 minutes all in all.

The hotel has a Marco Pierre White restaurant and a pretty nice bar which is open until around 1 am. I have not eaten in the restaurant, but the room service from there has always been good enough. The bar gets pretty busy on Friday and Saturday nights and service can be awfully slow with people ordering cocktails. It is, however, a great bar for a nightcap looking out over the Brayford and university grounds.

Check-out is generally pretty quick, so no concerns there.

If you want a modern hotel that is in a nice area with bars and restaurants, then the DoubleTree is for you. It is a little bit of a walk if you are staying in Lincoln purely for the historical side of the city, but for me, the DoubleTree is always my first choice when I am returning to the city.