Club Serena Resort — Hotel in Cebu

I was able to get a glimpse of Club Serena during our road trip to the south of Cebu over the weekend. Please note that this review ONLY applies to their restaurant and not the entire resort.

PROS:

The restaurant has very clean surroundings and is shaded by flowering plants and trees. You can see the staff making sure that the area is clean at all times. Great ambience. It boasted one of the cleanest beach fronts where the restaurant is located. You will be welcomed with the sea breeze while indulging yourself with your ordered good food. The restaurant has decent menu with selection of meat, fish and vegetable dishes. They even have set meals to choose from and most importantly, the menu prices are reasonable. The staff will let you choose where to sit depending on the number of guests in the restaurant. You will be provided with free starter while your ordered food is being prepared. Nice! Good food. The food we ordered tasted just right, not too salty nor oily. We ordered breaded pork chop set meal.

CONS:

Going there is a bit of a hassle as it’s located at almost the end of the road in Brgy. Saavedra with some parts of the street unpaved Orders will be delivered to your table although when we checked, it took them over 20mins to get them prepared You can only order wines in a bottle. No wine per glass in the menu. Bummer! When ordering at the restaurant, and you need an official receipt, you may need to go the front desk to get it. The front desk is located about 20 meters from the restaurant premises. Though the restaurant accepts your payment, they just could not issue receipts. Don’t you think that’s weird? During our stay at the restaurant, as mentioned above, the sea breeze passes through the wide doors and of the oval shaped restaurant interior. This also poses possible strangers to just get in and offer you something or ask for some change. In our case, a guy with guitar just stood right beside our table while playing his guitar and expecting for money. Stray dogs and cats are everywhere too.

Overall, the experience was good. Other than those points for improvement, we enjoyed our short stay at Club Serena. The ambience complimented some of the lapses. Will go back there if...

This is based on my personal experience and yours hopefully would not be as bad as ours.

First off, the resort is good. Rooms were clean and spacious. Staff were polite. The pool was clean as well as the restaurant. If we only based my review on those things, should have been a 5-star review right?

A few things made our stay less enjoyable. First, the beach. It has a few meters of white sand. But when you get to the water, there actually are a lot of rocks that hurt when you step on so I advise anyone who swims there to protect your feet. Worse, there are A LOT of sea urchins very close to the shore and one of us actually fell victim to it. The sad thing is the lifeguard never warned us about them despite him knowing this since he had a spray bottle of vinegar ready for treatment when we told him about the incident. So that definitely is a minus.

The restaurant served good food with very tolerable prices. So at 6PM, we ordered in advance and asked for the food to be served at 7PM. There were a lot of guests in the resort but since they did not complain of the 7PM schedule, we assumed everything was fine and manageable. But food never arrived at 7PM and only started to be served at 730. To add insult to injury, they even missed to list some of our orders so we waited for them to be served only to be told later that they weren't listed. No staff asked if all our orders had already been served. If one of them asked then the issue could have been mitigated. Not a very happy dining experience and pretty sure not one that made our tummies happy as well. To be fair, their food tasted good. They just messed up on our orders. Or perhaps we were given lower priority over the more fancy-looking guests.

You should also take note that the Municipality requires fees for every tourist even if you are from Cebu despite the obvious lack of good roads and sense of security. I wonder where...

We booked this based on the location and nothing else.

We did not expect to find ourselves in paradise.

The place is a collection of private houses that have excellent facilities. Like Shower place with actual shower curtains!( This may seem like an odd statement to make, until you visit Philippines and notice the common practice of no separation between the different sections of the toilet.)= Having that separation really makes for a better experience using other parts of the toilet like the toilet seat. Haha

The resort is also located right next to a white sandy beach and has outside huts and shelters with comfy cushions to laze around in. With an addition of a swimming pool. The pictures you might find does not do this place any justice.

The facilities are really clean and utilities provided are also good. They also have an in-house tempu driver who will take you to town for 150pesos flat.

Pro tip based on our experience ( MUST READ- thank me with likes to this comment if you end up finding it useful with your visit)

-As amazing as this place is, it is located remotely from the town centre, and frequent commute using tempu's can be costly, a better option is to rent out a vehicle.- There is a scooter rental place run by an Italian guy in town centre, his company is MarcoBikeRental or something. He rents bikes out for as cheap as 300pesos per day. If you can find cheaper ones even better. But rent one and drive your heart out. I really cannot recommend renting out a scooter enough. My Mrs and I only rented a scooter out for 1 day and we thoroughly loved the experience. Plus it was cheaper than using the tempu.

-The drinks and food are a bit pricy at this resort, so I would also recommend buying your alcohol and snacks in town and then scooter-ing back to the resort to relax and share a drink under the sun, or in the shade....