Why I am leaving this comment is to warn about the management. The unprofessional, sneaky & almost racist treatment by the owner & her daughter left a sour taste in our mouths & helped darken an otherwise wonderful wedding. We organised the booking of this resort over the internet & via a friend in Davao who helped with face to face meetings.

Firstly we gave the number of people staying at the resort as 25. We were told that the resort could accommodate for this many people but when we arrived we found that the only way to do this was to throw some spare mattresses on the floor of the existing rooms so a room that would normally only hold 2 or 3 had 5 or 6 in them including the wedding couple having to share the room with some of the guests. This was a little embarrassing for us as most of our guests travelled from Australia & Germany only to be camping on the floor of a small room.

Aside from this disappointing start we rolled with the punches & got on with it & enjoyed our stay & had a great time.
The major problem began when we went to pay the bill the price had magically gone up from what we had agreed upon as a fixed price. Now when we came to pay this we were doing this all through one of the staff members who I have to say was a wonderful person & a great host. She was put in the awkward position of having to try & squeeze the extra money out of us as the owners were not at the resort & refused to deal with us directly. To try & keep a long story short she ended up in tears as her bosses had informed her that if we did not pay the amount presented then the difference would be coming out of her wage and this poor girl certainly could not afford it.

Our guests were kept waiting on the taxi boat in the tropical heat for 2 hours while we tried to sort it out & ruined the day for many of them. In the end we had to delay the days trip, go to the office in Davao where luckily we were able to produce records of all previous dealings & arrangements & paid the original agreed amount after assurances the innocent staff would not be penalised by the owners.

The shameless attempt to get more money from us is something that I did not expect from such a large resort & was more akin to the type of small transaction that you would normally associate down at most Asian street markets. The way they used the vulnerability of the staff against us was also disgusting & really made me appreciate how fortunate we are to have laws protecting us against these types of people in Australia.

Bali Bali Resort, Samal, Philippines