Alona Pawikan

Alona Pawikan: A Small Resort in Barangay Tawala

Alona Pawikan sits on Ester Lim Drive in Barangay Tawala, about 500 metres inland from Alona Beach and 1.6 kilometres from Danao Beach on Panglao Island’s south coast. It’s a compact resort — three individually decorated guestrooms, each with its own furnished patio, a refrigerator and minibar, and a private bathroom with hot water and a hairdryer. Flat-screen TVs carry satellite channels, which is more than many Alona-area budget properties offer. On Booking.com the property carries an 8.8 rating (“Excellent”) from 218 reviews as of a mid-2026 check — a strong score for a hotel this size, and one usually driven by consistency rather than scale.

Rooms and On-Site Facilities

Because there are only three rooms, availability moves fast in high season (December–April and around Holy Week); guests who want a specific room — patio orientation matters more here than at larger resorts, since each of the three is laid out slightly differently — should book several weeks ahead. The property runs a small spa offering massages and body treatments, and a restaurant and bar called Bar Grill serves international dishes alongside a bar/lounge area. Free WiFi covers the property. The ₱6,250 nightly figure attached to this listing is an estimate drawn from comparable Panglao properties at a similar review score, not a confirmed live rate, so it’s worth checking current pricing on Stay22 before planning around it.

Getting to the Beach and the Reef

The 500-metre walk to Alona Beach takes most guests eight to ten minutes on foot, past the small guesthouses and dive shops that line the Tawala side streets. Alona’s own reef is a 1.2-kilometre coralline-sand arc where the house reef drops from shallow coral gardens to a wall starting around 20 to 30 metres — workable for snorkelers close to shore and for certified divers heading out to the wall itself. Organized reef tourism here traces back to backpacker beach huts in the early 1980s, and traffic through the area grew substantially after Panglao International Airport opened in 2018 roughly seven kilometres away, cutting out the old ferry-and-drive routing from Tagbilaran.

Boat trips from Alona Beach reach Balicasag Island, a marine sanctuary about 20 minutes offshore known for its sea turtle cleaning stations and the Black Forest wall dive past 40 metres. The Panglao local government caps visitor numbers there at 150 people a day and two dives per diver, with advance booking and an environmental fee of roughly ₱250 per diver — a deliberate limit meant to keep the reef from being overused rather than a bureaucratic afterthought.

Food, Day Trips, and the Wider Island

Guests based in Tawala are close enough to Alona’s Larsian-style barbecue stalls, which set up along the road from late afternoon, and to dishes like kinilaw na tanigue — Spanish mackerel cured raw in coconut vinegar, ginger, chilli and onion, made with vinegar tapped on the island rather than trucked in. From Alona Pawikan, day trips reach the Chocolate Hills — a field of roughly 1,776 cone-shaped mounds around Carmen, Batuan and Sagbayan, some reaching close to 120 metres, and the subject of a well-known local legend that they formed from the tears of a heartbroken giant, a piece of oral folklore rather than a documented geological account — and the Philippine Tarsier & Wildlife Sanctuary in Corella, a protected forest reserve where more than 500 tarsiers breed under strict no-flash, no-touch viewing rules. Both are roughly 45 minutes inland and are usually combined into one half-day countryside circuit, leaving early mornings and evenings free at the beach.

Orientation: Panglao Island Itself

Panglao is a separate island municipality from the Bohol mainland, connected by two bridges, covering about 44 square kilometres with a population of roughly 40,000 as of the 2020 census. Alona Beach sits within Barangay Tawala — the same barangay as Alona Pawikan — so guests here are within the busiest part of the island. Anyone wanting a quieter, north-facing alternative to Alona’s crowds can reach Doljo Beach, generally preferred by families and calmer during the southwest monsoon, in a short tricycle ride across the island rather than a separate trip requiring an overnight stay elsewhere.

Not everyone on Panglao works in tourism. In fishing communities around Danao and Boljo-on, some boat-building still follows traditional methods, though fibreglass hulls have mostly replaced wood for motorized outriggers over the past couple of decades — a quieter industry that runs alongside the dive shops and beach bars most visitors actually see.

Who It Suits

A three-room property like this works best for couples or solo travelers who want a quiet, walkable base near Alona Beach without resort scale or a pool; it’s a poor fit for larger groups or anyone needing flexible last-minute dates, given how few rooms there are to work with. Book through Stay22 or Booking.com and confirm the current rate directly, since a three-room inventory can price differently than the wider Panglao market.