Do You Travel

Some parts were good and others not so good. I would skip some parts knowing what i know now. We got to see a lot of the country but it became a little too much of the same thing. Would have liked some advice on what to do and not to do and why.

The transit in country was ok but had some issues like waiting at a airport 5 hours before boarding because they were worried about traffic. Killed an entire day to avoid traffic that was never there.

We had fairly short notice to arrange a visit to Philippines and Sarah did an amazing job helping us work out an itinerary and getting all the moving parts booked. When inevitable hiccups arose, she was readily available to help us resolve them. We found internal air travel to be fairly unreliable and Sarah went “above and beyond” to help us overcome significant communication and flight issues on our way out of Philippines. We’ll definitely use KimKim again and will hope to get a local expert as good as Sarah!

Hotel Review

Huni Lio

El Nido

Beautiful boutique hotel in a great walkable area for food and shopping.

Authenticity & Character

Location

Staff

Cleanliness & Comfort

Activity Review

Coron Island Super Ultimate Tour: Kayangan Lake, Barracuda Lake, Twin Lagoon, Balinsasayaw Reef

Coron

Initially seemed more commercialized than a similar tour in El Nido, but overall this was an amazing, well organized experience.

Quality of Experience

Food

Guides, Drivers and Staff

Transport

Van to underground river was very late, and a long tortuous drive. More time to fit in transfers would have been better. Four hour ferry ride was also unexpectedly rough and we should have prepared by taking Dramamine.

Our trip to the Philippines (Palawan/El Nido, Boracay, and Siargao) was overall very smooth from a logistics standpoint. All transfers were well organized, on time, and clearly communicated in advance. On that front, everything worked seamlessly and gave us peace of mind.

We initially had very limited time to plan, which is why we chose to use Kimkim and were connected with Sarah. While the coordination was efficient, we would have appreciated a more proactive and personalized approach early on—especially a video call to better understand our expectations and walk us through the differences between destinations. Instead, we were given a lot of written information and options to review, which was difficult to process given our time constraints.

In hindsight, we feel the itinerary could have been better tailored to our preferences. Several activities ended up being quite repetitive (multiple island-hopping tours), and many excursions were subcontracted to local operators of varying quality. Some tours felt more like mass-market group experiences than curated activities, and the level of crowding—particularly in places like Boracay—was not aligned with what we were looking for. We ended up cancelling a few tours because of this.

Additionally, a couple of experiences we had specifically requested—such as a scuba initiation and e-foil—were not included in the final itinerary, which was disappointing.

Overall, while the service delivered on logistics and saved us time upfront, we’re not convinced it added much value in terms of experience design. With more guidance, clearer recommendations, and better alignment with our preferences (especially around crowd levels and activity variety), the trip could have been significantly improved.

Hotel Reviews

Belmont Hotel Manila

Pasay City

Huge hotel with extensive breakfast. Cramped bathrooms. Pool facilities were minimal.

Authenticity & Character

Location

Staff

Cleanliness & Comfort

Hue Hotels and Resorts Puerto Princesa

Puerto Princesa

It was very good, huge family room, very modern and good breakfast!

Authenticity & Character

Staff

Cleanliness & Comfort

Seaclub Siargao

Siargao

Our private villa was one of the highlight of our visit to the Philippines. While not directly near the beach it is very walkable yet secluded. Once you put aside the extra cost for everything, you can have a really nice time there. The morning breakfast prepared in the villa by attendants and the on demand BBQ dinner + movie made for one of our best day.

Authenticity & Character

Location

Staff

Cleanliness & Comfort

Two Seasons Boracay Resort

Boracay Island

The location on the beach was good, our room next to the road not so much. Beds were not great, our room was outdated. Service was slow. The pool is pretty useless due to depth and location. Also the beach / ocean was full of algae when we visited, and Boracay was VERY crowded. I dont know how much we paid for it but I would stay elsewhere.

Authenticity & Character

Location

Staff

Cleanliness & Comfort

El Nido Coco Resort

El Nido

I would stay at this hotel again. The staff was good, the location is very convenient and quite secluded from the frenzies of El nido centre.

Authenticity & Character

Location

Staff

Cleanliness & Comfort

Activity Reviews

Siargao Land Tour

Siargao

Nice tour with highlight about the lagoon.

El Nido Island Hopping Tour B: Caves & Islands

El Nido

This was one of our best tours but be careful to opt for a big boat and small boat (so you have some privacy and are not cramped in a local boat). Because the day is long and groups varied! Some will get drunk, some will be loud, some will take up all the space.

Food

Boracay Island and Beach-Hopping Boat Tour with Snorkelling

Boracay

This is a useless tour. They put you on several beaches for 30-45 min each with nothing to do. The snorkelling part was useless, with dead corals all around. It was underwhelming after El Nido.

Quality of Experience

Food

Premium food was a joke.

Puerto Princesa Underground River Tour and transfer to El nido

Philippines

I really appreciated the zipline adventure before, it is worth it even though not utterly safe. The underground tour was good because we didn't have many people at that time. Our tour was a bit big (~15-20pp)

Quality of Experience

Food

The buffet are of very poor quality.

Guides, Drivers and Staff

Transport

The car driving us to El nido was not very comfy for this long drive

We really enjoyed Buko Resort, I forgot to mention in my Google review Ritchelle at Buko but she was AMAZING. Overall, we enjoyed the Philippines, though we were only here a week. The KimKim team put together a good tour of the islands and overall enjoyable experience.

All locals were very kind and friendly. All drivers except for one showed up on time. This one driver said he was told to be there at 8:00 per the company and our itinerary said 7:00.
Excursions were not always as represented. Example the firefly evening was supposed to be two different boat rides into the bay for a
dinner on a floating restaurant followed by view of the city lights and then the fireflies. In reality it was a river boat ride on a small skip. We never saw the bay or a floating restaurant, it was a buffet on land.
Island hopping in El Nido was amazing however was not as represented. We were told we would go to Big Lagoon, Entalula Island, Helicopter Island, Snake Island and Cadlao Lagoon. The above islands are actually a combination of 4 different tours and we were only able to see 2 of these locations.
The ATV ride was 90% city streets.
The Bohol Countryside Tour was great however we were unable to do the add on cable car tour due to our driver picking us up one hour late. This was not the drivers fault but a time issue between pick up company and Kimkim.
We were scheduled for a sunset sailboat ride and we were told our time was up 10 minutes before sunset.

This was a really large trip with 12 people over 12 days. Over $40,000 was paid for this trip not including the price of the airline tickets to get to the Philippines. The planning of this trip spanned around 9 months. The bulk of the planning I needed help with was coordination of transport between hotels, inter island domestic flights, and a few excursions. The core of this was achieved with Sarah. However a few major issues occurred during our trip which could have been better laid out to me or planned differently. One was the ferry from Cebu to Bohol. We wanted to go from Boracay to Bohol so Sarah booked us a flight from Boracay to Cebu then a ferry from Cebu to Bohol. OMG what a waste of a day and an experience I never want to have again. The airport in Bohol was 5 minutes away from our resort, but we ended up spending 12 hours commuting from Boracay to Bohol rather then just taking a flight. If Sarah had pointed out options I would have never taken that ferry. Then a bucket list item of a whale shark tour was completely botched. Our group woke up at 4am to be ready for our whale shark tour but the operator never arrived. I tried to get ahold of the tour operator, Sarah, and her assistant. By the time someone returned a call it was too late to do the excursion. I never heard back from Sarah which left a sour taste in my mouth. A big mess up like that I should hear from the person whom I trusted to make this dream vacation work. I did hear back from Sarah’s assistant with some excuse about dates being mixed up and we would be refunded for the excursion. However missing out on a bucket list item like this feels like only a refund misses the mark on fixing the wrong. Overall the trip was successful and we will have memories of a life time. The transportation companies Sarah provided us with were very nice and punctual. Also our accommodations during our entire stay were excellent. However with the issues we did have, those cannot be overlooked or forgotten.