Sipadan Mangrove Resort — Hotel in Borneo

Where to begin? Where’s the negative stars button? I’ll just start at the beginning: Sipadan Mangrove Resort is the absolute worst place with a bed I have ever had the misfortune of staying at, to say nothing of the worst resort. They advertise online to pick guests up from the airport for double the price they offer on site (50 MYR/person rather than 25 MYR/person). Our driver never greeted us or welcomed us to Borneo, introduced himself, or engaged in conversation on the drive to the resort.|||| The road from the resort turn-off to the resort is in profound disrepair from the heavy trucks hauling palm oil fruit from the tens of thousands of acres of oil palms in the vicinity.|||| Entering the premises everything appears to be unfinished and non-operational eg, dusty, brown, non-landscaped property, many empty abandoned aquaculture ponds, and a tiny playground set and torn above ground pool in a large baking hot, sterile gravel lot making up the entirety of the “theme park”.|||| Inside the main lobby was cool and well decorated, and the clerk was friendly enough although several other staff members, especially Matteus, wouldn’t look at us or welcome us to their resort.||Check in was quick and easy, but for reasons that became abundantly clear shortly, we appeared to be the only guests at the resort. Despite this, there was no offer made to upgrade our room like a high-end hotel or resort would do.||When we were taken to our room, we found it to be a very long way from the rest of the resort, even by golf cart, with the only window looking directly at another room across a small, barren, courtyard. The building placement was terrible because we were unable to see the river, palm trees, or mangroves, which was disappointing, but that was soon to be the least of our concerns.|||| Trying to get online to confirm our first dive of the next day we discovered that there was a problem logging on, and because there was no phone in the room and no transportation for guest use I had to walk a very long way back to the resort lobby to ask for assistance. Here I was told that the resort WiFi had been non-operational for the past month for some unknown reason and there was no end in sight! Flabbergasted by this revelation, and by the additional facts that no notices had been placed on their website or hotel booking sights and no effort had been made to alert our travel agent of this development, and that when we arrived the staff hadn’t immediately informed us of the problem and offered available options for dealing with it, we decided to leave.|||| We were then informed that a refund would not be possible due to the lateness of the cancellation, and we informed the front desk clerk that we could not be forced to stay in a subpar resort with subpar service and services without some type of remuneration, which they were unwilling to offer. This began a completely wasted afternoon of trying to resolve the problem, which ended with us being forced to spend one night due to the procrastination and delay tactics of the office staff and management, with the rest of our stay being refunded. The manager Sabril is either impotently helpless or shrewdly clever because though he was courteous and appeared anxious to help, he never offered any useful suggestions or compensation for our lost time and immense frustration with a discount, room upgrade, or other perks. The resort wouldn’t even give us a free ride into Semporna as a small gesture of apology.|||| I cannot un-recommend Sipadan Mangrove Resort enough to prospective vacationers to Sabah who are looking for a relaxing, hassle and stress free place to base your diving and other adventures from.||||Takeaway Tips:||1. This resort is Not on the coast. Do not stay here if you want to be able to see the ocean or even be able to walk to the beach on your own; impenetrable mangrove swamps stand in your way and the use of resort kayaks and other guest-use water toys are confined to a small drainage ditch/dead-end canal as a precaution to help avoid tempting the local salt water crocodiles.||2. Other than the above mentioned ditch kayaking, the only other activities advertised on site by the resort are snorkeling trips and a spa. There is also a privately owned dive center located here which offers exorbitantly priced diving (350 MYR for 3 dives excluding Sipadan island plus an additional 100 MYR for SCUBA equipment rental).||3. To restate the above point, this resort is an hour and a half from Semporna, which means that if you are not planning to engage in the extremely limited activities offered on site, and are not coming here for the express purpose of peace, quiet, and getting away from Everything, you are going to be stuck in the middle of vast tracts of oil palms and mangroves a very long way from anywhere. Complementary rides to town are not offered by the resort.||4. Staff are either unfriendly, unhelpful, or just plain unengaged and don’t care about their guests or resolving guest problems. The one exception is the kitchen and dining room staff, who did a good job and made lots of delicious, well presented food fresh for us...

I personally think this is a wonderful place for a weekend escape albeit the road condition along the way there was not exactly great(but this would cease to be a problem if you drive a four wheel drive car). I only went there for 2 days and only stayed for a night but I felt it was a very satisfying experience. It has a quiet ambience and away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Thus, it is definitely a good place to relax, meditate or even just pampering yourself with a long overdue rest. Although there'd be 1-2 hours of power cut every day ( probably because it's located quite far away from the city centre which contributed to the insufficient power supply for the usage there ), it wouldn't affect your experience there as you'd mostly be out in the islands enjoying activities like fishing trips(which could last the whole day from 8am-3/4pm if I'm not mistaken), and island hoping. The activity that I enjoyed the most was watching the fire fly and the crocodile hunting trip (rm50 per person), the Pak cik who cruised the boat was so caring as he knew that there would be plenty of mosquitoes, lit the mosquito repellent candle under our seats. (Ps please bring your own mosquito repellent or anti mosquito patches). The island that we went (Mabul, kapalai) was the closest island but it still required an hour of boat ride. I personally enjoyed the speed boat ride but if you have motion sickness, please do avoid the ride or bring a pill with you.. RM470 per person for a night if you're sharing a room with a partner, if not there's an extra charge of RM100 (if I'm not mistaken) . But the rm470 includes the accomodation( room was huge....), buffet meals for the time you were there and the boat trip to the islands. If you're lucky, you even get to see the baby Turtle by the beach in the island. Super ecomical and definitely worth every single penny of it. Oh ya, there's also a bar and an area to play table tennis by the canteen if you're bored. Please do not miss out the banana fritter served during dinner time, best in the world ! Lastly, pray hard for it to be sunny because if it rains it would really sabotage the whole...

We based ourselves here as we knew we wanted to do some snorkelling but not diving around Mabul island (and had heard accommodation on such wasn’t great). ||||Got to admit this place made us quite sad - it’s built for an army but we were the only ones there at one point in our stay over 3 nights. The WiFi was ‘having issues’ (didn’t work at all, I suspect that had been the case for months - expect no signal at all either!), the ‘bar’ was just Tiger beer and the food was nice although very repetitive. ||What’s really odd is the cleaner didn’t even come to our room after the first night even though we were only ones in resort at that time. ||It takes a good 45 mins to get here off the beaten path from Sipadan airport- make sure you book transport with the hotel. ||It’s very much in the middle of nowhere so unless you’re doing trips every day (they don’t come cheap either, at £40 a pop per person per day) there isn’t much to do (especially if no WiFi). ||They need to give this place some TLC and they have room for an Olympic swimming pool so they should at least have a small one somewhere...||A strange experience and feel awful for saying it as whoever built it had great expectations but don’t think we will be heading back. ||||If you do one thing Mangrove, sort...