Traveling on a budget? Let’s Go!

MANILA, Philippines - Iloilo City is on the move. With business investors coming in, a nearby international airport, and a vibrant culture of food and festivals, historical churches and beaches, it’s becoming a local destination people want to check out this summer.

And one of the better ways to experience the city and its surroundings is staying at its newly opened Go Hotel.

“We’d like to promote travel in the Philippines,” says Roseann Villegas, director for corporate public relations at Robinsons Land Corporation (RLC). “Destinations like Iloilo, Bacolod and Dumaguete are always near a Robinsons property, integrating mall facilities with hotel facilities.”

You may think traveling on a budget means you get a budget experience. But with Go Hotels, Robinsons Land Corporation’s line of budget accommodations, budget travel doesn’t have to mean “cheap.”

Start with the amenities. Go Hotels prides itself on offering the “Big 8” — items that budget hotels often strip away as non-essential — as part of the package. That means free air-con, free Wi-Fi, free soap and shampoo, free towels and linen. Plus they offer Windsor beds with 100-percent-cotton sheets, pillows and duvets, 32-inch LCD TV with cable, super rain showers, and a free combination safe. All items you won’t necessarily get at other budget hotels, except by paying extra.

Set in the center of the city’s business district, Go Hotel is conveniently part of Robinsons Place Iloilo, with its three levels of shopping and eating choices. We flew into Iloilo City’s clean and modern airport — on Cebu Pacific, naturally — and quickly checked into our Go Hotel room.

With fun, funky circular designs on the walls, novel foldaway “hooks” instead of a closet and a foldout writing table, you can see how Go Hotels maximize room space. The beds are comfortable, and the bathrooms offer powerful rain showerheads. The philosophy of Go Hotels is a little different from other value hotels.

“We’re courting the emerging smart traveler,” says Adrian (“Adi”) Ong, Go Hotels sales and marketing assistant manager. “Just as Cebu Pacific pioneered the budget traveling industry, we wanted a hotel to complement that.” Just as Cebu Pac does away with free snacks, travel insurance and other add-ons, Go Hotels removes things their research found many travelers didn’t use.

“We’re the first value hotel chain in the Philippines,” Ong adds. “The Gokongweis wanted to bring this idea here. We’re one of the first, and one of the biggest. Go Hotels is no-frills accommodation, meaning we take away the non-essentials like the gym, swimming pool, mini-bar, business center — things ordinary guests don’t use. As travelers, most of us are just using the hotel as a sleeping place. We come in and go out the next day to travel.”

Staying competitive is another way that Go Hotels is a pioneer. Initially offering its “8-Peso Rooms” promo (which sold out in just a few hours), Go Hotels plans to offer more 8-peso sales in the future. Regular rates start at P688, but can be as low as P350 plus VAT during monthly room sales. “We don’t take away anything in the room,” notes Ong. “It comes with standard amenities, no matter the rate.”

Iloilo is the seventh Go Hotel and the company’s second biggest, next to Mandaluyong, with 167 rooms. Other branches include Puerto Princesa, Dumaguete, Tacloban, Bacolod, Otis-Manila and Ortigas Center, each one strategically nearby or attached to a Robinsons Mall.

Iloilo is growing, not only as a business and tourist destination, but as a jump-off point to nearby destinations. With places like Guimaras just a ferry hop away, Leyte close by, and a number of UNESCO sites within driving distance, more and more travelers are discovering this city.

“People also use Iloilo as a hub to go to Boracay,” notes Ong. “When flights run out in Caticlan or Kalibo, they use it as a hub to drive north to get to Boracay.”

But that doesn’t mean there’s little to do in Iloilo. We took a ferry on our first day and headed to Guimaras, a place known for two “M”s — mangoes and monasteries. Guimaras has some of the lushest, sweetest mangoes, and we visited the BPI-National Mango Research and Development Center to get the lowdown on why their mangoes rock. Over mango pizza, we heard how the large number of calcium deposits in the soil, the island’s relative isolation (leading to more land devoted to plantations) and the research center itself (which sells seedlings to local farmers at reduced government prices) helps it produce the country’s only mangoes that are internationally certified as free of both mango seeds and pulp weevils.

Best of all, perhaps, is the Manggahan Festival: staged on April 25, it’s an all-you-can-eat feast where P200 buys your stomach’s fill of fresh mango. You start with a whole kilo and nothing but your bare hands to peel and consume the yellow fruit. Festivals are a big part of Guimaras culture — everything from beauty and singing contests to international motocross and BMX events.

Genned-Up Travel and Tours next took us to the local Trappist monastery, one of the only all-male monasteries in the Philippines. Mostly, we found ourselves enjoying the gift shop, with its monk-endorsed homemade mango chips, rum chocolate balls, guava jelly and ginger beer. Glad to see the monks have healthy appetites.

Our bus took us further to the coast of Nueva Valencia, where we passed the day until sunset at Raymen Beach Resort. Iloilo is emerging as a vacation destination with untapped beaches and you can take a day trip to most of them from your Go Hotel. Raymen’s stretch of sand and sea is a nice one, though other resorts vie for space on this particular beach, and the many swimmers create a festive atmosphere.

In one of the open-air cabanas we had a lunch that consisted of Iloilo’s main specialties: chicken inasal, biscocho (long biscuits topped with butter and sugar) and those unparalleled Guimaras mangoes paired with suman (rice cakes). In fact, Iloilo is the birthplace of fast-food chain Mang Inasal — the very first branch opened in Robinsons Place Iloilo — which popularized not only the barbecued chicken dish but also introduced the unlimited-rice come-on to the rest of the country. Our inasal was so tasty we ate close to a half chicken each (and Mang Inasal founder Injap Sia is so successful he has a number of buildings named after him in Iloilo City).

On another occasion we sampled La Paz batchoy, the legendary noodle soup that originated from Iloilo’s La Paz market, though eateries like Deco’s, which also occupies a prominent spot in Robinsons Place Iloilo, have elevated the once-humble soup to a sit-down-restaurant comfort food. We topped our batchoy with lots of chicharon cracklings and garlic, and noodle fanatic Therese made no bones about having two bowls of it.

Foodies could have fun combing Iloilo in search of the best inasal, batchoy and biscocho (we already know the best mangoes come from Guimaras), but we also discovered that the city is home to fashion designer Jaki Peñalosa, whose family were pioneers in the hand-woven hablon industry. Today Jaki is still keeping this weaving tradition alive, experimenting with the textile by mixing it with imported threads to create softer, finer, more elegant-looking fabrics.

Peñalosa will show her hablon creations at Philippine Fashion Week this May, though we got a sneak preview of her collection at Go Hotel’s function room. Exquisite dresses and gold piña barongs feature Calado embroidery (another technique she’s preserving), and Peñalosa layers sheer textures on frocks with that mullet hemline that’s all the rage today. A floor-length terno in black hablon shot with gold is the showstopper of the collection.

Though you can order from her at Philippine Fashion Week, there’s only one Jaki Peñalosa boutique in the country, and that’s in Robinsons Place Iloilo. According to Rofel John Parreño, group marketing communications manager of Robinsons Land Corporation, the mall has always made it a point to support local entrepreneurs like Peñalosa.

Food-wise it was the first to house Mang Inasal and other Ilonggo enterprises like Biscocho Haus, Deco’s La Paz Batchoy, Ted’s Oldtimer Lapaz Batchoy, Afrique’s, and Chika-an, where Go Hotels offers guests breakfast every day. Pinoy favorites like beef tapa, smoked longganisa and tocino are on the menu, as well as healthier options like a vegetable omelet, bangus and cornflakes with milk and fruit. Now owned by a Korean gent who lives in Iloilo with his Filipino wife, Chika-an also serves the best chorizo we’ve ever tasted (sourced from Cebu), and other must-tries like Utan Bisaya soup, crispy pata, sizzling squid a la pobre, baked scallops, and chicken relleno.

But Robinsons Place Iloilo is notable not just for its dining and retail outlets. It also houses government offices like PhilPost, the Department of Foreign Affairs, and Mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog’s office, which will serve as the local headquarters for APEC next year.

Consequently, “Robinsons Place Iloilo has won Mall of the Year twice, while RLC overall has been cited (by Euromoney magazine) as the overall best-managed company in the Philippines,” Parreño says, for both 2013 and 2014.

Being that we were visiting Iloilo shortly after Easter, it was a good time to check out their historical churches. An hour’s drive from Iloilo City will take you to Miag-ao Church, originally completed in 1797. During Spanish times, the fortified church walls — stretching to the coast — served as a stronghold against Muslim raiders. Its remaining façade — with carvings of St. Christopher holding on to a coconut tree while carrying baby Jesus, wooden spears and Filipinos wearing tahag — reflects an unusual mix of local and Church culture; it’s no wonder this impressive structure is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, listed among “Baroque Churches of the Philippines.”

Winding down the road back to town, we discovered Guimbal Church, with its 17th–century façade built from adobe and coral sourced from Guimaras. The church holds another story, though: supposedly, the people of Guimbal had amassed a lot of gold from local mines and by WWII, fearing Japanese forces, they hid most of it beneath the church structure. Legend has it, though, that General Yamashita took all of it to fuel his vast war treasure.

Another church worth visiting is Jaro Cathedral, dating back to 1874. A mystery surrounds this one, too: legend has it that a young beggar boy who would hang around the church was spurned by the richest man in town. He decided to curse the town with water, and a flood reportedly inundated the town, engulfing the church as well as the rich man’s home. The church’s Sto. Niño statue surfaced after the flood, and churchgoers quickly installed it again as a symbol of salvation. But it reportedly had gotten bigger, and was too large to fit into its original niche (we think it absorbed a lot of water in the flood and slowly began swelling, but that story’s just not as interesting as the “mystery”).

Another impressive baroque structure is Molo Church, 10-15 minutes from downtown Iloilo City. Strongly Gothic in style, it also houses 16 images of female saints inside, earning it a nickname as the “women’s church.”

All in all, Iloilo offers a lot for curious tastes — food, festivals, beach getaways and local history. And checking it out with Go Hotels as your home base is a smart way to travel. Even smarter, Go Hotels now accepts Robinsons Land Corporation gift checks as payment for walk-in guests (not for online bookings, though). That’s all kinds of convenient. “Like traveler’s checks, they can be canceled when lost,” says Ong. “They’re a multipurpose, handy and novel way for frequent travelers to enjoy a safe and affordable vacation.”

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For more information or to book a room, visit www.gohotels.ph.