Alona Northland Resort

Alona Northland Resort: Kitchenette Rooms on Ester Lim Drive

Alona Northland Resort sits on Ester Lim Drive in Barangay Tawala, about a four-minute drive from Alona Beach and nine minutes from the jump-off point for Virgin Island, the sandbar-and-snorkeling boat trip that’s a common half-day add-on for guests staying anywhere in this part of Panglao. Booking.com lists the property at 8.3 out of 10 (“Very Good”) across 245 reviews as of mid-2026 — a solid, high-volume track record for a resort of its size. It has 19 rooms, built around an outdoor pool with a poolside bar, a garden and small library area, and on-site Thai massage.

The Rooms

This is one of the more specifically documented properties in this group: the deluxe rooms come with a king bed, a refrigerator with a small freezer compartment, a flatscreen TV, wardrobe, individual air conditioning, and a kitchenette stocked with a rice cooker, electric kettle, cups, plates, and utensils — genuinely useful if you’re planning to self-cater breakfast or a late-night snack rather than rely on the resort restaurant every meal. Bathrooms are described as modern, with a separated shower booth and a detachable shower head rather than a fixed overhead unit. Reviewers repeatedly single out the balconies: several mention rooms overlooking the pool with clear sunrise views, and more than one review specifically calls out the balcony’s table-and-chairs setup as a genuine plus rather than an afterthought — “spacious” and “big point” are phrases that show up more than once in guest feedback.

Practical Details

Cooked-to-order breakfast is included, and the resort offers free WiFi in selected public areas along with on-site parking. Tagbilaran City is about a 20-minute drive and Tagbilaran’s airport roughly 25 minutes — this property sits further from the airport than some of its Alona-area neighbors, which is worth weighing against the shorter hop to Alona Beach itself and to Virgin Island’s boat launch. The ₱2,730 nightly figure in the frontmatter is an estimate built from five comparable Panglao properties with a similar OTA rating, not a live confirmed rate, so check current pricing directly before booking.

The Beach and Diving Context

Alona Beach, the reef tourism anchor a short drive from here, is a 1.2 km coralline-sand arc whose house reef drops from shallow coral gardens to a wall around 20–30 meters — a reef that’s supported organized dive tourism since backpacker-era beach huts opened in the early 1980s, well before Panglao’s own airport arrived in 2018 and shortened the trip from Cebu or Manila to a same-day flight. Divers heading further out typically book trips to Balicasag Island, a marine sanctuary about 20 minutes offshore known for sea turtle cleaning stations and a wall dive called Black Forest; the local government caps activity there at 150 people a day with mandatory advance booking and a roughly ₱250 per-person environmental fee, a genuine reef-protection measure rather than a marketing note.

A History Stop Worth Knowing About

If a mainland day trip routes through Poblacion, Panglao’s town center, the Panglao Watchtower is worth the short detour: a five-story hexagonal coral-stone tower built in 1851, declared a National Cultural Treasure in 2011, damaged in the 2013 Bohol earthquake, and restored and reopened in 2017. It stands beside St. Augustine Parish Church, built mainly between 1894 and the early 1900s with a portico added in 1925, and the ruined façade of an even older 19th-century church next to it — three distinct building phases on a single compound, and a more substantial stop than most itineraries give it credit for.

Cooking for Yourself, and What’s Worth Buying Local

Given the in-room rice cooker and kettle, it’s worth knowing what to bring back from a market run versus what to save for a restaurant meal. Panglao’s own version of raw fish — kinilaw na tanigue, Spanish mackerel cured in coconut vinegar, ginger, chilli, and onion — uses vinegar still tapped and produced on the island, and is better eaten fresh from a stall or restaurant than attempted in a kitchenette. Late afternoon brings Larsian-style barbecue stalls along the Tawala road, charcoal-grilled skewers sold streetside for a few hundred pesos, worth a walk or short tricycle ride even with a stocked kitchenette back at the room. Also worth knowing, if only as local color: the island holds no river system, so all water here, including whatever fills that in-room kettle, is drawn from a freshwater lens sitting above saltwater in porous limestone — dry-season over-extraction has pushed some wells past the WHO’s chloride guideline, so bottled or filtered water for drinking is standard practice, not a house-specific caution.

Who This Suits

With a genuine, sizeable review history and kitchenette rooms aimed at longer, more self-sufficient stays, this suits travelers planning several nights on Panglao who want to cook a meal or two themselves and value a documented balcony-and-pool view over beachfront proximity — the trade-off being a slightly longer drive to both the airport and Alona’s restaurant strip.