Sun, sea, beach
Hotels, private villas, restaurants and bars, and tours — built to feel like they belong to each other, because they do.
Local setting, international standard.
SOMA is a lifestyle hospitality brand operating in El Nido, Palawan. The idea is simple: most places do one thing, and the rest of a traveller's day is somebody else's problem. We would rather own the whole day — where you sleep, where you eat, what you do between the two — and hold all of it to one standard.
The group behind SOMA has been operating hospitality businesses for over a decade, most recently with an eight-year run in Hong Kong. Palawan is where that experience is going now.
We came to El Nido for the same reason everyone does, and stayed because of what was missing. The bay is extraordinary and the operators serving it are, for the most part, doing the minimum. There is room for somewhere that pays attention — to the boat, to the food, to the people running it — without pricing itself out of reach.
Bacuit Bay is a protected area and its coral is the reason anybody comes. We work within the municipal fee and access system rather than around it, brief guests on reef contact before they get in the water, and keep group sizes to what a site can absorb. On expeditions we carry out what we carry in, and we are guests in the fishing villages we pass through.
We hire locally and train properly. If you are a captain, a guide, an instructor, a cook or front of house and you want to work somewhere that takes the job seriously, write to us.
Use the enquiry form, or write to hello@soma.tours with your dates, how many of you there are and what you would like to do. We read everything and we answer properly rather than with a template.
Tell us your dates, how many of you there are, and what you’d like to see. We’ll put together the days that make sense and come back to you.
hello@soma.tours