The Loboc River Lunch Cruise: Is the Buffet Worth It?

Almost nobody books the Loboc River cruise on its own. It arrives in the middle of a countryside day, somewhere between the Chocolate Hills and a tarsier sanctuary, and by then you have already paid for it. So the question is not really “shall I do the river cruise” – it is whether to pick the version of the day that includes it, and what to expect when the plate is in front of you.

Short answer: the river is the product. The buffet is the seating arrangement.

What it actually is

A wide covered raft, thatched roof, long tables, lashed to a motorised outrigger that pushes it upstream and back. The Loboc is a deep green, slow river with coconut palms leaning in from both banks, and for most of the trip that is all that happens, which is the point.

The full run takes roughly an hour to an hour and a half. There is a buffet of Filipino dishes and there is live music – usually a singer with a keyboard or guitar, at a volume that some passengers describe as part of the charm and others describe in less generous terms.

There are two boarding points, and this catches people out:

• the Loboc Tourism Complex in the town centre, and
• the Loay Bridge landing, roughly 5 km downstream, from which boats run upstream towards Loboc rather than the other way.

Which one you use depends on your operator, not on you. If you are meeting a tour, confirm which landing – they are twenty minutes apart by road and “the Loboc cruise” is not a single dock.

About the price, honestly

This is where we are going to disappoint you slightly, and on purpose.

Walk-up rates for the cruise-plus-buffet are quoted very differently depending on the boarding point, the operator and how recently the page you are reading was updated. We have seen it broken out as a cruise-and-lunch charge plus a separate maintenance and safety charge, and we have seen single rates well above that. The rates have been revised upward more than once.

So we are not going to print a peso figure and let you find a different one at the counter. Ask when you book or before you board. What we can stand behind are the prices of the bookable day tours, because those are fixed at the point of sale:

• The Chocolate Hills tour with the Loboc cruise and lunch – €56.77 for eight hours, 4.1 stars from 143 reviews. The most-booked pairing of the two.
• A buffet-lunch version of the same loop at €53.55, also eight hours, but holding 3.5 stars from 52 reviews – the lowest-rated of the popular countryside days, which is worth knowing before you save the €3.22.

That gap of three euros against a gap of 0.6 stars is the whole decision, and it is not close.

The buffet, and why the reviews disagree so violently

Read enough reviews of this cruise and you will find “the food was very good and well priced” sitting directly above “the food is terrible, don’t do the buffet”. Both are written by people who went.

What is going on is that the buffet is a volume operation on a boat: rice, a couple of stews, grilled fish, noodles, fresh fruit, held warm for a rotating crowd. Judged as lunch on a river in the Philippines for the price of lunch, it is fine and the fruit is usually the best of it. Judged as a meal you chose, it is average, and anyone who arrived expecting a restaurant experience says so in one star.

Practical notes rather than opinions:

• Go early in the sitting if you can. A buffet that has been open forty minutes is a different buffet.
• Vegetarians should ask in advance rather than hope. The spread is fish-and-meat-led, and the reliable options are rice, vegetables and fruit.
• It is a boat. There is one small toilet, and a queue forms after everyone eats.

When the cruise is genuinely worth it

• You want a sit-down break in a long day. A countryside loop is a lot of van. A good hour on the water in the middle of it changes the shape of the day more than the itinerary suggests.
• You are travelling with older relatives or small children. It is shaded, seated, flat and short. Of everything on a standard Bohol day this is the easiest hour – see Bohol with kids.
• The weather has gone against you. The river looks good in overcast light. The Chocolate Hills do not.

And when it is not:

• You care about food. Eat in Panglao or Tagbilaran and book a countryside day without the buffet. Under Chocolate Hills tours there are 65 offerings from €22.42, plenty of them without a floating lunch attached.
• You want the river quiet. The lunch cruise is the busy, amplified version of the Loboc. The same water at night, with the engine off, is a completely different experience – that is the firefly kayak on the Abatan and the night river cruises, and if you only have room for one river trip, we would take that one.

Where it fits in the day

The standard order is Chocolate Hills in the morning, the river at lunch, tarsiers and a church or two in the afternoon – the loop described in Chocolate Hills, tarsiers and the Loboc River. Coming from Cebu, the same cruise appears in the long day-trip versions, which is a fourteen-hour undertaking for the same good hour on the water; Bohol as a day trip from Cebu sets out whether that maths works.

One last thing worth saying plainly: the cruise is a tourist institution, not a secret. There will be other rafts. There will be a microphone. If that is going to annoy you, the honest move is to book the countryside day without it and spend the hour somewhere else – nobody on the boat will be offended, and you will have made the right call for you.