We did it, woohoo! After some years of thinking about it, we succeeded in taking the plunge and upgraded two more of our glamping units to no longer be glamping units but now be actual, real, hardside “home quality” cabins. It’s a major upgrade and increase in quality for our guests.
Why did we upgrade?
Well, glamping had a lot of great benefits and we still like the idea, but for us we found upgrading preferable because:
– Glamping tents need to be replaced every several years. If you take great care of them, they can last longer, and you can stretch out their lifespan with extra effort, but they need replacement, and that’s a significant cost. We were able to upgrade the units to hardside cabins for maybe 2x the price of replacement tents, but the new walls should last many more years and require less maintenance.
– Hardside structures provide better insulation, they can retain cool air from air conditioning (coming soon!) better and reduced humidity compared to canvas. The structure provides a more complete seal than the tents, keeping out all bugs!
– We gained an extra 1 meter of interior space in both the width, length and height in the cabin compared to the tent because of the way our previous tents needed space for the external rope systems to pull the tents taut.
– We were able to include larger windows than were possible in our previous tents, providing more light and airflow.
– Reduction of quirky “glamping tent” issues like zippers on windows and doors breaking, sewn seams coming undone, mildew on canvas and more.
So overall we are able to provide guests with more space and a more premium experience while providing us with a better long term investment. We aren’t opposed to glamping per se, our experience with it was good and people do like it and there are some right times and places for it, but for our use case upgrading seems a great move so far.
We had already pioneered this with our Mountainview family cabin unit, which has the extra cool inclusion of the raised loft, a kids and family favorite, which adds to the capacity of the cabin to be able to house 6+ people comfortably.
So next time you come to our great Binga Beach Resort you can look forward to staying in some upgraded beachside Palawan accommodations. Oh also, every unit now also got included bathrooms! (glamping units used to use our large central battery of bathrooms and showers)
Continue to follow our progress and we make Binga Beach greater in ways big and small every day!