El Nido Travel Guide: Boat Tours, Where to Stay and Where to Eat

El Nido Travel Guide and the Best Things to Do in El Nido

Hello again, everyone! 🙂

El Nido, in the north of Palawan, was a small town in a relatively less developed part of the country, with no luxury, and we believed it would give us everything we wanted from our Philippines trip: sea, diving, sun, beaches, books, calm, solitude, peace and romance! So we were incredibly excited on our way to El Nido. Now, having done it all and come back, we’re writing this post with great pleasure.

Did El Nido live up to our expectations? It did, but it also had plenty of difficulties and things that wore us out. We’ll get to that.

So let’s begin. 🙂

From Puerto Princesa, the first stop of our Philippines trip, we reached El Nido by minivan in 7 hours. You pay around 800 pesos per person for the Puerto Princesa to El Nido ride, and we have to say it’s not an easy journey. The roads are bumpy, the drivers are crazy, you’re squeezed together in a tiny minivan and most drivers smoke non-stop. There are also local buses that take 10 hours and are 2-3 USD cheaper, but if you ask us, don’t bother. The ride really was more uncomfortable than it needed to be. Luckily the thought of where you’re going gets you through it somehow, and the moment you arrive, the tiredness disappears…

Getting around El Nido is again by tricycle, and wherever you go it costs about 50 pesos (1 USD); the nice thing is you don’t have to haggle every time. Also, cards are accepted almost nowhere, and where they are, there’s usually an 8% fee. So always carry cash.

2026 note: Every visitor pays the El Nido Eco-Tourism Development Fee (400 pesos, valid for 10 days), usually collected by your tour agency or hotel. Popular spots like the Big Lagoon now have daily visitor limits and time slots, so book your tours a day ahead.

Although El Nido is small, it’s lively and crowded. Most tourists are backpackers like us. That’s the good part. The bad part is that there are now far too many backpackers like us in this tiny town. As a result, local businesses have caught on and prices have multiplied in recent years. Accommodation prices in particular now compete with Europe. Expensive bars and restaurants aimed purely at tourists have opened, completely out of tune with El Nido’s air, water and spirit. The number of agencies running boat tours has grown and the beach is packed with tour boats…

Maybe El Nido would have been nicer if we’d come five years earlier, but we could also have come five years later… So even if it wasn’t the El Nido we’d hoped for, the El Nido we found made us happy. Crowded or not, how bad can it be to see a thousand shades of turquoise? 🙂

Where to Stay in El Nido

Accommodation in El Nido is a bit of a headache. Especially if you’re going in peak season, try to book your hotel in advance. And if it matters to you, and we think it does, ask whether the hotel has hot water, because hot water is a luxury in El Nido. 🙂

Because we reached El Nido a day earlier than planned, we had to find another hotel for the first night. At the last minute we found Bulskamp Inn. It was right in the centre of El Nido and quite comfortable compared with the other hotels we stayed at in the Philippines. But we paid 75 USD per room per night (breakfast included), the most we paid for accommodation in the Philippines. If there’s availability, grab it! If we’d found a room, we’d have loved to stay at Inngo Tourist Inn right next door. Don’t miss it if you find a room there.

Our second hotel was Dreamland El Nido Palawan, a 20-minute walk from the centre (5 minutes by tricycle). We chose it because it was a quiet bungalow by the sea, away from the centre, but there was one thing we hadn’t counted on. Bugs! What bugs they were: insects, mosquitoes, biters, stingers, whatever they were! There was a mosquito net in the room, but every night the bugs found a way through it, and we couldn’t sleep for scratching. Note also that there’s no room cleaning. The bungalows are cleaned once before you arrive and nobody comes into the room again. No towels, shampoo or soap either… So we didn’t really find what we were looking for in these bungalows. El Nido wasn’t kind to us when it came to hotels. 🙂 The best thing about this place was its smiling owner and her daughters.

If you still insist on staying here, the Booking link is here 🙂

We paid 50 USD per night with breakfast.

El Nido Boat Tours

The must-do in El Nido, and of course its most touristy activity, is the boat tours to the islands of Bacuit Bay.

There are around 200 tour agencies in El Nido and they all offer the same tours, at roughly the same prices. So when choosing a boat tour, what matters is asking the agency how many people will be on the boat and what time it leaves in the morning. Too many people or a late start can be a problem. Everything else is pretty much the same across all agencies and boat tours. Even the lunches on the boats are the same 🙂

We booked our first boat tour at an agency we wandered into in central El Nido and were very happy with it; all the staff were really friendly. It was Hannah Travel & Tours, right across from El Nido’s famous restaurant Trattoria Altrove. (Sometimes sharing links or contact details in travel posts gets mistaken for advertising, so let’s say it: this isn’t an ad, we paid for our tours down to the last peso. 🙂

Bring a dry bag and water shoes on these boat tours, you’ll really need them.

So, Which Boat Tour?

The 20 or so spots around El Nido are split by area into four tours, and every agency sells them: Tour A, B, C and D.

Based on all the research we did before going, everyone recommended Tours A and C, and when the locals said the same, we didn’t think twice and booked Tour A for the next day and Tour C for the day after!

El Nido Tour A

On Tour A, the boat leaves around 9 am and drops you back on the beach around 5 pm. It stops at four spots during the day, with about an hour at each.

The day we did this tour the sea was a bit wild, and before we even reached the first stop our eyebrows were white with salt; we were travelling in the sea rather than on it. In the end we put on our snorkels inside the boat to escape the waves hitting our faces!

Our first two stops were the Small Lagoon and the Big Lagoon. Of all the places we visited in El Nido, these two were our favourites. When you arrive you can rent a kayak for around 400 pesos and paddle around the lagoon. Paddling in these lagoons was our first “ahh, peace” moment in the Philippines. The scenery is stunning, especially if you love photography.

Commando Beach was the last stop of the tour, a place to relax with a beer or a coconut. But when the sea is rough, this beach gets very wavy, and while trying to swim out we brushed against a poisonous plant growing in the water. The part of our feet that touched it didn’t heal for days, and no medicine helped. It’s still peeling.

Shimizu Island is where we had lunch. They prepare lunch on the boat and bring it ashore. All our boat tour lunches were the same: chicken, eggplant salad, prawns, rice and mango. Neither great nor terrible, but it does the job!

The boat drops you back on the beach around 5 and you rest until your next tour.

El Nido Tour C

Of course, Tour A hadn’t satisfied our craving for the sea yet, so as soon as we got back we booked Tour C for the next day.

The stops, in order:

Helicopter Island: It’s named after its shape, which looks like a helicopter. It has a nice beach, but after the lagoons the day before our expectations were sky-high and this felt a bit ordinary. Still, we swam, laughed, had fun and moved on.

Secret Lagoon: Here the boat stops in front of a small hole in the rock, and one by one you squeeze through it into what they call the Secret Lagoon, a space surrounded by trees, coral and sand! This was another of our favourite stops.

We had lunch on Star Beach. There are coral reefs here too, great for snorkelling. Lunch was the same.

Hidden Beach is another peaceful beach. If anyone needs to “hit the reset button”, so to speak, this is the place.

Our last stop was the Matinloc Shrine on Matinloc Island. After exploring this abandoned shrine you can climb to the top. The view is incredible.

We said we came to the Philippines looking for peace, and maybe because we found it in those two days, we decided to do something crazy: a two-day boat trip with a night on a deserted island. And if we were doing it, we’d do it properly, so we booked the El Nido Party Boat!

El Nido Party Boat

El Nido has a type of tour called overnight camping: you spend the whole day on a boat tour, at the end of the day they drop you with your tent at a remote camp, and the next morning they pick you up to continue the tour. Backpackers, couples, adventurers, romantics and anyone wanting to try it are of course drawn to the idea of “a night on Lost Island”.

There’s also an El Nido Party Boat version of this. Over two days the boat takes you to the best spots of Tours A, B, C and D, as well as places the other tours don’t visit, drops you on a deserted island at the end of the first day and picks you up in the morning. For both days there’s unlimited food and drink on the boat, music and dancing. They even hand you food, rum and the next morning’s breakfast when they drop you on your island in the evening, so you can keep the party going.

You spend that night in a tent on a deserted island. You don’t need to bring anything; they give you everything from sleeping bags to pillows. Of course there are no toilets on the island, you sort that part out yourself! 🙂

After reading all this on the party boat’s website, we got really excited and decided to take a two-day break from our “quest for peace” and feel young again. Apart from the bug bites and back pain after two days on a boat and in a tent, we could even say “hello, we’re young again”!

For us it was an experience we can recommend in many ways. Sleeping under the stars, waking up under the stars and, despite the headache from the previous night’s rum, being happy to feel “young again” made us very happy.

We paid 100 USD per person for two days, all inclusive. When you think about it, it isn’t expensive, because we didn’t pay for a hotel that night and didn’t spend anything else for two days. It seemed reasonable to us. (Prices have gone up since then, so check the current rate.)

We were actually planning to stay one more day in El Nido after the two-day trip to rest, but then we heard another typhoon was about to hit El Nido, so we bought tickets for the first ferry and set off for Coron. We’ll come to that in a moment. 🙂

Nacpan and Las Cabanas Beaches

These two recommended beaches, which we didn’t have time for, can be reached by tricycle from the centre. Honestly, after what we’d seen on the boat tours we’re not sure they’d have impressed us, but they’re worth a try if you have time.

Apart from these, there isn’t much to do in central El Nido. If you have spare time, rent a motorbike and explore the nearby villages. A motorbike costs around 8 USD a day. If we’d had more time, we’d have explored the villages rather than the beaches.

Central El Nido is very small, and you keep ending up on the same street. There are also a lot of places to eat and drink for such a tiny town. In principle that’s a good thing, but many “American-style” places have opened, and their prices are so high for a cheap country like the Philippines that they felt bursting with artificiality, so we never went to them.

Here are the places we did eat at:

Where to Eat and Drink in El Nido

Bald Guy Grill grills the meat you choose and brings it to your table. Reasonable prices and tasty meat.

Republica Sunset Bar, near Corong Corong beach, is popular with backpackers. The food wasn’t great, but the view and the music were wonderful. Worth going for that alone.

Two nights in a row we had dinner at the Falafel Restaurant on the main street. Don’t let the name fool you, it’s a falafel and kebab stand on the street. We loved it.

Trattoria Altrove and Art Café are, in our opinion, El Nido’s two overhyped spots. There’s a permanent queue at Trattoria Altrove, and as in most El Nido restaurants you have to take your shoes off to go in. It’s also expensive. We thought about it on the first day but never went. Art Café was highly recommended on TripAdvisor, but we left after seeing the prices. Maybe it’ll sound strange to some of you, but in a town like El Nido where people earn a dollar or two a day, paying 15-20 USD for a plate of food feels odd to us. We’re not really foodies anyway! 🙂

Angle Bar was another highly recommended place, but again we didn’t love it. Happiness Bar, on the other hand, we really liked. There was also the much-recommended Habibi Restaurant, but we didn’t get the chance to go. Anyway, after the boat tours you’re so tired in the evenings that you’re sleepy by 10 pm. Those legendary tequila nights stay a dream! At least they did for us…

El Nido was a town we came to with huge expectations and where we had wonderful experiences. It would have been better without construction everywhere and the crowds, but it was still beautiful as it was.

Of course we’d have loved to spend a lazy day just wandering around El Nido, but we didn’t want to get stuck on the island by a typhoon, so we said “captain, put us on the first ferry out”, and as luck would have it, instead of the fast 4-hour ferry to Coron we got the slow wooden boat that takes 7 hours. Had we known we’d be swaying on the open sea for 7 hours in that boat, we’re not sure we wouldn’t have preferred the typhoon…!

When we reached Coron, we felt like kissing the ground.

For our Coron trip, click here. And for the whole route, see our Philippines travel guide.

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Lots of love!