About cebu.tips — A Practical Travel Resource for Cebu Province

Maayong adlaw. Welcome to cebu.tips.

This site is a practical travel resource for Cebu Province — written from a Cebuano-aware perspective for people planning a trip to Cebu, whether that means a week on Mactan, a south-coast loop through Moalboal and Oslob, a ferry across to a neighbouring island, or a long working stay in Cebu City. It’s a new publication. The pages here are being built deliberately, one verifiable guide at a time, with the goal of filling the practical-travel-content gap for Cebu specifically.

This page explains what we cover, how we make money, and what the site is — and isn’t — trying to do.

What cebu.tips covers

The site is organised around four scope pillars:

Tours — booking-intent pages for the activities most visitors come to Cebu for. Oslob whale shark snorkels, Moalboal sardine run and Kawasan canyoneering, Bohol day trips from Cebu, Malapascua thresher dives, island-hopping in Mactan, food tours of Larsian and Sugbo Mercado. Every tour page maps a real product available on Klook, GetYourGuide, or Viator, with honest notes on what the operator includes, what they leave out, and who the trip suits.
Hotels — neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood guidance for Cebu City, Mactan resort and condotel options, beach-front properties on Bantayan and Malapascua, and category guides (luxury, mid-tier, budget, hostels, long-stay). The recommendations are made on merit, not on which booking platform pays the highest commission.
Transportation — the ferries, the buses, the airport transfers, the inter-island flights. OceanJet, SuperCat, FastCat, 2GO, Ceres, Cebu Pacific, PAL. Operator-level profiles and route-level guides, because getting around the Visayas is a meaningful chunk of trip-planning effort.
Destinations — Cebu City, Mactan, Moalboal, Oslob, Bantayan, Malapascua, Camotes, Argao, Dalaguete, the north coast, the 44 cities and municipalities of the province. Each destination hub aggregates everything we’ve written about that area into a single starting point.

There’s also an Essentials section for the practical logistics that don’t sit neatly inside any of the four pillars — when to visit, SIM cards and connectivity, money and budget, packing, the cross-Cebu travel guide that links the rest of the site together.

Geographic scope, honestly stated

Cebu.tips covers Cebu Province. That’s the simple version. The longer version: if Cebu is one endpoint of your trip — Mactan as your airport, Cebu City as your base, a ferry from Pier 1 to somewhere across the water — you’ll find it covered here. That includes day trips and ferries to Bohol, Negros, Siquijor, and Leyte that depart from or arrive at Cebu. It does not include standalone Bohol or Manila destination content. Bohol’s Chocolate Hills are written about here as the substance of a Cebu-departing day tour, not as a Bohol travel guide. If you’re planning a trip that doesn’t touch Cebu, this isn’t the right site for you, and we’d rather say that than pretend otherwise.

Within Cebu, the province has 44 cities and municipalities and roughly 4,950 km² of land area. Coverage skews toward the places visitors actually go: Mactan, Cebu City, the south corridor (Carcar, Argao, Dalaguete, Oslob), the south-west (Moalboal, Badian, Kawasan), the north (Bogo, San Remigio, Bantayan, Malapascua, Daanbantayan), and the Camotes group offshore. The interior municipalities are covered where there’s a reason to visit — Osmeña Peak, Casino Peak, Simala Shrine — and acknowledged where there isn’t.

How cebu.tips makes money

Running an independent travel site costs real money — hosting, research, the time to write and update guides. We earn that money through affiliate commissions on bookings made through partner links. The partners are: Klook, GetYourGuide, Viator, Booking.com, Agoda, 12Go, and Airalo. When you click a booking link on this site and complete a reservation, the partner platform pays us a small percentage of the transaction. You pay the same price either way — the commission comes out of the platform’s margin, not yours.

That’s the standard model for independent travel publishing, and we think it’s worth saying clearly rather than hiding in a footer.

What this also means, practically:

Recommendations are made on merit, not commission rate. When two platforms list the same tour, we compare them on cancellation policy, on-the-day clarity, and operator reliability — not on which one pays us more.
We don’t accept paid placements that aren’t disclosed. No “sponsored” hotel listings dressed up as editorial. No tour operator pays to get featured.
We don’t see who books what. Affiliate platforms send aggregate commission data, not customer names, contact details, or itinerary specifics.

The full breakdown is in the privacy policy. The legal framing is in the terms of use.

What cebu.tips is — and what it isn’t

What it is: a publishing site. We write guides. The guides aim to be detailed enough that you can plan a trip from them and book through the right platforms when you’re ready.

What it isn’t:

A booking agent. We don’t take payment. We don’t issue confirmations. We don’t hold reservations. Bookings happen on Klook, GetYourGuide, Viator, Booking.com, Agoda, or whichever partner the link points to.
A complaints desk for operators. If a tour was disappointing, if a hotel room looked nothing like the photos, if a ferry was cancelled without warning — those are between you and the platform you booked through (or the operator directly). We can’t process refunds we never collected.
A live booking system. Prices, schedules, and availability change. We update guides when we become aware of significant changes, but we can’t verify every detail on every page in real time. Always confirm critical bookings with the provider before you finalise plans.
A track-record claim. Cebu.tips is a recent launch. There’s no “fifteen years of reader testimonials” story to tell here. The site stands on the quality of each individual guide, not on a legacy claim it hasn’t earned.

How the site is written

Every page on cebu.tips is built to answer the question a traveller would actually ask — not the question that’s easiest to rank for in search results. That means specifics over generalities: Pier 1 vs. Pier 3, Tubigon vs. Tagbilaran, ₱150–250 vs. “cheap,” Punta Engaño vs. “Mactan.” Where a price or schedule is current, we say so and date the check. Where it’s likely outdated, we say “confirm before travel” rather than pretending the number is fresh.

We avoid the standard travel-content patter. Banned phrases on this site include “hidden gem,” “world-class,” “pristine,” “nestled,” and the various flavours of “don’t miss.” Those phrases tell readers nothing. If somewhere is worth a visit, the specifics will say so without needing the label.

A note on the local-perspective framing: cebu.tips is written for visitors but maintained from a Cebuano-aware viewpoint. That means structural things — Cebu is the protagonist of every page, not a side-trip from somewhere else — and tonal things: where local context helps (how Grab drivers refer to a pier, when the BPO night shift changes Salinas Drive traffic, which lechon shop on Carcar’s main road has the longest line), we include it.

Errors, corrections, and reader tips

Travel information changes. Ferry schedules shift. Hotels close. Tour operators retire products. If you find an error on the site — a wrong price, a closed venue, a route that no longer runs — use the contact page and be specific: the page URL, the section, what’s changed. We read every message and update pages when corrections are verified.

If there’s a destination, route, or activity within Cebu that you think should be covered and isn’t, the same contact route applies. Reader tips will shape what we publish next.

Where to start, if you’re new to the site

The four pillar hubs are the natural entry points: Tours, Hotels, Transportation, Destinations. There’s also Things to Do for activity-led browsing and Essentials for the logistics layer.

For a single starting page, the Cebu travel guide is the cross-province overview — what to expect, how the geography breaks down, what to book and when. The Cebu transportation hub is the equivalent for the logistics layer. If you want to know what the province actually contains, the 44 cities and municipalities directory is the comprehensive list.

If you’ve made it this far down the About page, salamat — and welcome. Whatever brings you to Cebu, the goal here is that the guides get you there well-prepared.