Fun Hotel

Fun Hotel: A 39-Room Hotel with Chinese Cuisine Near Alona

Fun Hotel sits at Purok 5, Barangay Danao, listed as roughly a six-minute walk from Alona Beach. With 39 air-conditioned guestrooms, it’s one of the larger properties in this part of Panglao, closer in scale to a commercial hotel than the guest houses and small inns that dominate the immediate area. Rooms include family configurations with private bathrooms and free WiFi. The hotel runs a sun terrace, a garden, and an on-site restaurant serving Chinese cuisine for lunch and dinner — an unusual specialty in a town otherwise dominated by Filipino and international beach-resort menus. Continental breakfast is available for a fee from 6 to 10 a.m., and guests can play billiards on-site. Booking.com lists a 6.9 rating from 107 reviews, and TripAdvisor ranks it #67 of 84 hotels in Panglao at 3 out of 5. Hinagdanan Cave is about 7.5 miles away and Baclayon Church roughly 13 miles, both on excursions to the Bohol mainland.

Rooms and Scale

Thirty-nine rooms is a meaningful jump in scale from the six-to-twenty-room properties typical of Danao and Tawala, which generally means more consistent staffing and amenities but less of the personal, family-run feel smaller guest houses offer. The Chinese restaurant on-site is worth noting specifically: it’s not the default cuisine offered at Panglao hotels, and reviewers who mention it treat it as a genuine point of difference rather than an afterthought buffet option.

Local Taste, Alongside the Hotel’s Own Kitchen

Guests curious about Boholano food specifically, rather than the hotel’s Chinese menu, can find kinilaw na tanigue nearby — raw Spanish mackerel cured in coconut vinegar, ginger, chili, and onion, made with vinegar produced on Panglao itself — along with Larsian-style streetside barbecue stalls that set up along the Tawala road from late afternoon into the evening.

Day Trips Inland

The hotel’s location makes it a workable base for the standard mainland circuit: Chocolate Hills, the cluster of grass-covered limestone cones about 45 minutes to an hour inland, and the Philippine Tarsier Sanctuary, a similar distance. A well-known piece of Bohol folklore attributes the Chocolate Hills’ formation to the tears of a heartbroken giant named Arogo, mourning a lost love — a story local guides still tell on the drive out, offered as legend rather than the marine-limestone erosion geologists point to.

Economic Context

Panglao’s tourism economy spans a wide range, from backpacker huts at PHP 600–800 a night to mid-range cottages at PHP 3,000–6,000 and a small number of four-star resorts above that. Fun Hotel’s estimated PHP 2,000 rate places it toward the lower-middle of that spread — priced above the cheapest backpacker huts but below most purpose-built resorts, consistent with its larger room count and hotel-style, rather than boutique, positioning.

Water and Practical Notes

Panglao draws its water entirely from a freshwater lens within the island’s limestone bedrock, since there’s no river system on the island; dry-season over-extraction has pushed chloride levels in some wells well past WHO drinking-water thresholds, which is why bottled or filtered water is standard practice here rather than tap water. A tricycle to Tagbilaran City runs roughly PHP 150–350 depending on whether it’s shared or hired, and hourly fast ferries connect the mainland to Cebu in about two hours.

Diving and Reef Access

For guests who want to combine the hotel’s convenience with reef time, Alona-based dive shops run daily boat trips to Balicasag Island, about 20 minutes out by outrigger and one of the most-cited dive sites in the Visayas for its resident sea turtles. Access is capped by the local government at 150 divers and snorkelers a day, two dives maximum per diver, booked in advance with a roughly ₱250 environmental fee — a deliberate limit meant to keep the reef from being overwhelmed by the volume of visitors Panglao now draws.

An Inland Alternative

For a change from beach and pool time, Poblacion — Panglao’s municipal seat — holds the island’s most significant heritage site: the San Agustin Parish Church complex, which includes the Panglao Watchtower, a five-storey hexagonal coral-stone tower raised in 1851 and declared a National Cultural Treasure in 2011. It sustained damage in the 2013 Bohol earthquake and was restored and reopened to visitors in 2017, though only the exterior and grounds are accessible today since the original interior stairs were never rebuilt. Beside it stands the St. Augustine Parish Church, built mainly between 1894 and the 1920s, its nave ceiling carrying murals of the Seven Sacraments — a compact, three-structure heritage site worth an hour or two away from the beach.

Fun Hotel suits travelers who want a larger, more conventional hotel setup near Alona rather than a small guest house, and anyone specifically interested in the on-site Chinese restaurant as an alternative to Panglao’s usual seafood-and-grill dinner options.