PhilFAQS

I’ve been busy th4e past couple days with some local travels here on Luzon, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t let the moment slip away to report on a little of our highly successful trip last week to Davao City.

We chose to stay at the Linmarr Davao Apartelle & Suites. 

(In the interest of full disclosure I’ll let you know that I have connection to this establishment, fellow Blogger Ellen from www.sailsamal.com, but that is not the reason we chose to stay there. To find out why we ended up at Linmarr read on)

First of all, many who are reading here may not be familiar with the term Apartelle.  It’s a quite common here in the Philippines but I haven’t run into it too many times elsewhere.  It’s a contraction of Apartment and Hotel, which typically means rooms have at least kitchenette facilities and are often oriented for longer-term stays.  Linmarr does this in a well above average way, because unlike many establishments that have little or no hotel features to go along with the apartment, fend for yourself living, they have most any hotel service you can imagine provided, many as standard service, so the distinction between hotel amenities and long-term stay basics are not noticeable.

I went with my wife, the Unofficialcook, her sister and sister’s two lovely boys, Mazen 4 and Sami 3.  If you start looking for accommodations for a mixed bag crowd like this you are going to need two hotel rooms in most establishments, unless you sleep more ‘chummy’ than we do.  And when you have little kids along you are well advised to have a ref for leftovers and for those late night times when they suddenly get hungry because they ware too excited to eat during regular meal time.  Now looking for two bedrooms or two separate sleeping areas and a minimal kitchen is not really all that tell an order, so if I just searched online for hotels in Davao at random I might wind up with quite a list to wade through.

The key thing, I felt, I was looking for was ‘family accommodations Davao’ and that’s what jumped up in first place on Google in the natural search engine results … I typically don’t look at the paid advertising results or the sometimes useful but often troublesome Google Map listings, unless the ‘real’ (natural search) doesn’t produce for me..  Linmarr now had two important things in it’s favor before I even looked at their amenities and price.  They had a real website,and they cared enough to make it easy for me to find them in Google.  This is kind of a lesson the overwhelming majority of Philippine hotels have yet to grasp … and US hotels too, for that matter.  When I want a place to stay, I like to see an informative (contact information, price, services, etc.) web site right there under the hotel’s own name.  I don’t care for the huge hotel listing sites who want to serve you up 10’s or even hundreds of hotels .. that’s just extra work for me, typing in more and more queries and refining my search, and then finding out that the ‘mega site’ listing doesn’t tell me what I want to know.  Listing in a site like hotels.com may be a bonus (some of those sits even charge hotels for listings, removing any hope of impartiality), but if you care about your hotel, or anything else of value you want people to buy, just follow some simple rules and put a small amount of effort into your search listings … when you stand out on Google, you stand out to me, before I even know who makes the mattresses on your beds.

I looked at Linmarr’s listings and everything looked like it would be a good ‘fit’ for us, so I decided to make a reservation.  They could do things better in my book here, since instead of registering directly online, one has to fill up an online form and send that off like an email message.  But I’ll use a system this way if that’s what is available, as long as it works.  Getting an answer back by the end of the next business day is my basic criteria, and here is the next place Linmarr exceeded my expectations.  Instead of a return email, I got a phone call from Linmarr, confirming my reservation and asking me if I needed a pickup at the airport … a free service I hadn’t even noticed in advance (here in the Philippines where labor is cheap, the vast majority of hotels couldn’t seem to care less how you get there …they either offer no airport service or make airports pickups insanely expensive and often cumbersome.  I’ve even been asked to forward a cash deposit separate from the room reservation for pickup service .. how insane is that?)  Instead, when we got off our plane and walked to the door of Davao’s excellent airport terminal, there was the smiling driver with a sign with our name on it, he grabbed the bags and off we went.  Expectations exceeded yet again.

The units like the one we stayed in are similar to what would pass as a quite small two floor, two bedroom town house apartment in the US.  )Of course, ‘small’ is relative, they are far bigger that PhP 10 or PhP 12 million condo units in Manila, so suffice to say they are large enough to be quite comfy for three adults and two small boys.  The units are clean and comfy at a reasonable rate of PhP 2968 per night (about $63 USD at today’s rate).  They take major credit cards as a matter of course, with no annoying add on fees, as I mentioned, airport transfer in a modern clean van with a friendly driver are free, an excellent cooked breakfast is provided in a nice, sit-down restaurant on site, and the staff is just perfect, exceptionally friendly and accommodating.  There’s free Wi-Fi Internet access and a very nice adult, children’s and poolside cafe complex.  The location is off the beaten track … no tricycles blatting past all night long, but walking distance from a large public market, drug stores, 24-hour convenience stores and quite close to down town … we used a taxi several times and I think out highest fare was 62 Pesos (did I mention cabs in Davao are cheap ? Also, Davao has many brand new taxis, clean and quiet LPG powered … wonder when some of the other cites like Manila (where cabs routinely will be three times as much) will catch on?).

Bottom line?  Highly recommended, I’ll certainly stay in Linmarr again if we make another trip to Davao.  Thanks Cheryl and all the rest of the staff for an outstanding stay.

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