Getting out into a boat and exploring is a favorite activity for our guests giving them a lot of adventure and satisfaction.
Boats are not only a way to get to other, hidden beaches, boating is also a platform for snorkeling, fishing, spearfishing and much more all over our bay area.
One of the most amazing qualities of our beach… is all the other amazing beaches nearby! Kidding aside, our own beach is truly magnificent and really incredible, with white sands, a broad expanse, and great swimming with no rocks, steep inclines, riptides or anything of the sort, it’s just a perfect beach for all activities and relaxing and especially for families.
But people love to explore and discover what’s beyond the horizon, and our area is truly blessed with a great variety of other beaches and spots to explore. All our favorite spots are between 15-25 minutes ride from our beach, depending on the ocean conditions and boat speed.
There is Lapus Lapus right to the south of us, with a great natural rock arch where you can see the ocean out through the big cover of rock, and it also has great snorkeling right there at the anchor.
There are the incredible beaches at the uninhabited Imuaran island off our coast, including a great big pure white sand beach, and a cool and very wild coral beach where we often find amazing shells and the view from there is majestic facing back towards Mt. Capoas.
One of the best spots of all is Emergency Beach, which is North of us along the coast but really only accessible by boat, and is an incredibly beautiful cove and also again with the white sand beaches.
Whether we can take guests out for island hopping trips is always dependent on the weather and its resulting seas as we can only go out when we are sure it’s quite safe enough, as we need to load and launch boats from our beach.
During the high season and most parts of the year this isn’t an issue as our coast is quite calm with very small waves, but when the waves get higher it is too risky to load a boat with guests.
Our current boat, the steel “Elodie-Aurelia” with its outboard engine is working great for small numbers of guests – we have had 4-5 guests aboard plus the captain is about the maximum depending on the persons sizes – but if the waves on the coast reach a certain level it has reduced ability to launch.
Behind the obvious revenue from guest nights in rooms, and then food and beverage sales from our restaurant, island hopping trips for guests are the next biggest ticket item and activity and source of revenue for us.
Our island hopping trips include snorkeling, a lunch cooked barbecue style on the beach, and stops at multiple beaches as per the guests desire. The days out are one of the best ways to earn their satisfaction with their stays – so the better our boat options, the more reliable they are to operate, and the wider range of sea conditions we are able to operate our boats in the better.
With added boats, that can carry more guests (right now we can only take perhaps 3-5 out in a day, unless we call in boats from our contacts but then we get much less percentage of the revenue) we can make more revenue more reliably per guest that stays with us.
A Rigid Inflatable Boat (RIB) style boat (a ‘Zodiac’ type with inflatable pontoon chambers) would be able to launch and maneuver more safely in a broader range of ocean conditions.
RIB boats are also a lot more fuel efficient and will save us money on gas, as they float on the water moreso rather than plowing through it.
They are significantly lighter compared to similarly-sized regular boats, and are therefore much easier to launch at the beach, requiring fewer people to help move it into and out of the water. This would help greatly to make island hopping trips easier to manage.
Guests love the traditional, wooden style banca boats. Being made out of wood they feel local, natural and aesthetic.
Due to their design and layout they have more interior space to spread out in than comparable steel or RIB boats, including with the possibility to move around on netting or the wooden supports that stretch out to the thick bamboo pontoons that support the boats balance out to its sides.
Advantages:
– More fuel efficient
– Launchability from the coast with fewer people needed
– Can perform in a broader range of sea conditions
– Faster speed on the water
– Longer durability than a wooden boat
– May be safer and more reliable than traditional boats
Disadvantages:
– Most probably need to import from abroad
– Slightly higher cost per same number of guest capacity
– Guests might be more exposed to sun conditions
Advantages:
– Extra space per passenger per cost of the size of boat
– The natural, local and tropical feel of such boats – they are very nostalgic
– Ability for local fisherman boatbuilders to help build and maintain such a boat
– We already have an engine to use for such a boat
Disadvantages:
– Much lower fuel efficiency
– Wooden boats need more ongoing maintenance and renewal of wooden parts and paint
– Requires many more people to launch and drydock these very much heavier boats.
Overall, our preference is to add a RIB-style boat as a complement to our existing steel boat, as it would help us server many more guests for island hopping adventures, in more sea conditions (reducing lost revenue from days when can not go on the ocean), with better fuel efficiency and safety. A RIB boat requires less manpower to launch which is a great advantage, and is perfectly suited to our conditions and needs.
That said, we also love native-style banca fishing boats, and are perfectly happy to add a mid-sized one to our operations if the joining Binga package member prefers this type. Further we already have an engine for this kind of boat (from a previous boat we owned but is gone – these kinds of boats don’t last forever!) So may be able to get “more boat for the money” than with the RIB boat where we need to also get a powerful outboard engine within the budgeted price.
If possible, getting both types of boat would give us the expanded range to carry guests in more weather conditions, and more capacity to carry many more guests total at any time.
Welcome to consider a members’ package at Binga Beach to help us succeed and join in that success!
The Ocean Member Package covers the cost of one of the most exciting parts of our Phase 2 Expansion project, a new Island Hopping Boat (or boats) that will give Binga Beach a much needed increase in capacity and range in our ability to take our guests out for great days out on the water and to our nearby beaches and snorkeling spots.
Price: $8,500 – 2 Boats Available
– Purchase and launching of 1 new (or used in the case of a bangka boat) Island Hopping Boat. Naming rights of the boat, it will bear your chosen name with a nice painting of the name on the sides and stern of the boat.
– 1 week stay per year, with food and beverages included, every year for 4 years. It is transferable, you can let any of your friends or family use it.
– $0.40 for every overnight guest at Binga during the year, paid at the end of the year, every year for 4 years.
– At the end of the 4 year period, the deposited money returned in full, $8,500.
Our lawyers at LMA Law will provide the contract for your review that ensures our obligation to the details offered here, while also protecting you as the potential partner and member from any liabilities of the resort. We will ensure transparency, limited liability, and adherence to the package deal offered. We are open to adjusting the contract we will share to address any concerns.
The structure of our offer is that of a membership arrangement conferring the perks, payouts and guarantees we lay out and limited to those.
Strong! Our company, by choice, financed all of our resort project with our own cash upfront, without any outside loans or debt, neither in the past or currently. We bought our beachfront property outright in cash and own the title outright, and similarly paid upfront for all of our projects like our large solar system, septic system, water system, large units and restaurant building. We are completely self sufficient “off of the grid”, have no debt, and are poised to generate revenue now for years to come.
Good! When we first purchased the property access to it on the existing roads was rather grueling on muddy and bumpy roads, but now there are many new roads and construction, drastically improving access in terms of effort and time required.
Also since that time a new airport opened up nearby in San Vicente, reducing the minimum drive time from an airport from 2 hours from El Nido to 45 minutes.
Further, some major real estate groups have also seen the potential for our area, being in a privileged and prioritized for promotion TIEZA zone, and have bought up many large parcels of land all around us for big tourism developments. Indeed, property values have doubled since the time of our purchase, and a lot of construction and investment is occurring.
Tourism trends post-Covid remain good for Palawan and the Philippines, and we have seen the island rebounding well in the past several years.
For reference, Binga Beach is located 2.5 hours south of Palawan’s main location attraction, El Nido, and is similarly north on the coastal to the other main attractions of San Vicente Long Beach and the backpacker hotspot of Port Barton. Most tourists travel a lot between these two popular towns, and we are a perfectly-positioned stop halfway in the middle.
For our Gold, Silver and Bronze packages, the most important benefits inclusion is the percentage of revenue for each year of the package of the sponsored unit. We will share information directly from our centralized booking engine provider, Sirvoy, where can see the occupancy history on a per-unit basis, and can filter it for any period of time.
Can see an example here, of the occupancy history of one unit, Beachside 1, for the year of 2024:
For reference, Sirvoy is our booking “channel manager” which functions as the central database in between all of our booking engine listings like AirBnB, Booking.com, VRBO, Trip.com our own website direct bookings, walk-ins and more to ensure we don’t accidentally overbook rooms, and it is the authoritative record of guest visits.
We will provide a quarterly progress report showing the occupancy history for the unit you have participated in (and also the whole resort) so you will know what range of payout can be expected. Note that there are big changes in occupancy for different seasons, in the rainy season from June to October we have much fewer guests, but make it for it in the high season from December to May.
For Spring, Mangrove, Solar and Ocean Club members there is a benefit of a certain US dollar amount ($1, $0.8, and $0.4) paid out for every overnight guest that stays at Binga Beach. An overnight guest is a single person staying in a unit for a booked stay for at least one night. A family of 3 staying in a single unit counts as 3 guests, though even if they stay multiple nights the count of them is still 3.
Visitors to Binga that only walk in for information, or a lunch restaurant visit for example do not count as overnight guests.
Just like the occupancy rates mentioned above, the counting of guests is tallied in our booking channel manager, Sirvoy. We will provide the information of the number of guests that have stayed at Binga so far every quarter, and pay the payout at the end of the year of their total at the end of the year.
Can see a filtering for a time period and the count of overnight guests in our Sirvoy system in this example here:
The expectation and history so far is that we have multiple hundreds of overnight guests every year.
As soon as you know what days you (or your friend or family you share your days with) wish to visit Binga, please check to see if they are available by looking at our Booking page here https://bingabeach.com/booking/ which shows live and up to date availability. You may choose any unit for your stay (you are not limited to choosing only the unit you sponsored), and once you see that the dates and unit you want are available, please contact us directly either by email or phone and we will manually set them aside for your stay.
Your 2 weeks do not have to be continuous, i.e. you may use one week plus multiple weekends, for example, and may use different visits for different persons, yourself or friends or family. Further, each visit can include multiple people, as long as they can match within the maximum occupancy of the chosen unit.
In the case of the project costing more, you as the client member will not be asked for any additional contribution. Any extra costs above the projected price will be for Binga Beach Brothers Inc. to cover to ensure the project achieves completion.
Since we have already built several other similar units and projects we are confident in our price estimates for current construction costs.
There are no maintenance, repairs, fees or similar for the unit – all such ongoing costs and upkeep will be covered by Binga Beach Brothers Inc.
Please feel free to reach out to David Le Smith, Partner and Property Manager, with all of your queries:
Email: david@bingabeach.com
Phone: +63 947 444 3597
First Resort in Palawan accredited by the Philippine Retirement Authority
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