The Palms Resort & Bar

We booked a triple room. The room assigned to us was on the ground floor. There’s an unpleasant smell (fishy) once you enter the room. We think it came from the bathroom. Upon entering the bathroom, there were 3 small cockroaches on the sink. We opened the faucet to drown them then the sink leaked. The caretaker was nice enough to fix the sink and replace its parts. He also cleaned the bathroom again. We stayed in the room for awhile to rest and got bit by small ants on the bed. When we came back from the beach to take a shower, the drain on the shower was clogged. It was hard to rinse off dirt since it wasn’t draining properly. We only stayed for 4hours and decided to transfer because it was too uncomfortable for us already. They can’t even transfer us to another room because they were fully booked. In the end, we decided to transfer hotels and only got a refund on our second night. We should have gotten a full refund for all the inconveniences we experienced.

We stayed at The Palms twice last year, and the experience was excellent in terms of checking in & out, food & beverage, room cleanliness, pool & jacuzzi, and room service. We even recommended the resort to family and friends. Thus, the past two bookings convinced us to go for The Palms once more this February 2023. However, at 10:47 PM of the night before we were supposed to check in, their staff updated via Facebook Messenger that they will transfer us to "JB Seafront Beach Resort" with room features that are not close to The Palms' (i.e. older interiors, bathroom has no partition between the shower area and toilet), because they did not notice that we booked via Agoda during the second week of January when they have already accommodated a whole resort booking for our chosen dates during the first week of January. The gap between the prior whole resort booking, and our booking was ONE WEEK. They had one week to update their records. Note that The Palms has listings in Agoda and Airbnb, and clients can also book with them directly. For a resort with less than 30 rooms, why can't their database be more updated at the end of each day? Why was the room we booked via Agoda still available during the second week of January, when in fact, the whole resort was booked by the first week of the said month? If there were system errors in their listings, why was I informed that we will be transferred to another resort less than 24 hours before our arrival? Also, why offer an alternative resort with worse facilities? Why can't they find a way to provide an alternative with facilities that are at least at par with theirs? This is a vacation, and if we allotted thousands of pesos for fuel and toll to and from Zambales to stay in a room with worse facilities than our own room at home, then we should not have just taken a vacation all together. I informed them that we are not accepting their alternative of transferring us to a cheaper resort, and that I will report them to the San Narciso LGU and Department of Tourism. It was only then that they retracted their alternative, and said that they will find a way to have us stay at The Palms. This made us all the more irritated. Why can't they solve their internal operational concerns first before dealing with clients? Why do they have to wait for clients to become angry before finding a way to accommodate them? In the end, we had our booking canceled and refunded due to lack of trust, annoyance, and dissatisfaction with the way The Palms front desk personnel handled this issue. We also requested to speak to their owner / manager, but she was not physically present, and was unable to talk to us over the phone. The front desk personnel even asked me to be the one to contact Agoda to request for cancellation, and this was the last straw. Did I create the problem in the first place? I refused to initiate the communication with Agoda, and The Palms eventually contacted them to facilitate the full refund. All in all