• Heidi Ganaden and her husband left their big-city corporate jobs to open a hotel on an island.
• The couple moved from Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, to Siargao, also known as the country’s surfing capital.
• One pandemic and a category 5 typhoon later, they’ve finally settled into their new lives.

Heidi Ganaden and her husband never thought they’d run a hotel by the beach in Siargao, an island known as the surfing capital of the Philippines.

The two of them were working corporate jobs and living in Manila, the capital city. She was in the telecommunications industry, while he was a landscape architect.

As avid surfers, the couple enjoyed hanging out by the beach but weren’t too familiar with Siargao; Ganaden had visited once before in 2005, while her husband had never been there before. The island is one of more than 7,000 that make up the Philippines.

But a quick weekend trip in 2018 — it’s only a two-hour flight from Manila — to visit some friends who were trying to set up a business there left them with a favorable impression of the island.

Not long after they got back to Manila, they received a call from their friends in Siargao about a plot of land by the beach that was available for lease.

“We thought, OK, maybe we can try and look at it. Maybe we can just put up a small shack so that we can go to Siargao, and we’ll have a place where we can stay,” Ganaden, 46, told Business Insider.

When they went to view the plot of land, they realized it was in a central location that was popular with tourists. New establishments, like restaurants, were also popping up all around the area.

They also noticed that more and more people were visiting Siargao, and they decided it might be a better idea to build accommodations instead.

“We actually didn’t have the idea for a hotel initially. It was really an accident,” she said. “We were in a central spot, and we thought it would be a waste to just offer it for a long-term lease, so we ended up with a small hotel.”

Trading city life for island living

By the end of the year, the couple had signed a 15-year lease and started clearing out the land. They preferred to keep the amount they spent on the lease private.

They broke ground in 2019. That same year, Ganaden and her husband decided to quit their jobs to focus on the project.

“We thought it was now or never,” Ganaden said. “We had no idea what we were doing, but we did it anyway because we were invested in it. We wanted to make it work.”

The construction of their hotel took place in phases, and they hired some 15 contractors to help out. Ganaden estimates that they spent about 20 million Philippine pesos, or about $340,000, on the construction of the hotel.

The building process was fraught with challenges. Even though the island was developing, it was difficult to find raw materials and skilled construction workers, Ganaden said.

“Imagine a whole island where everybody was building with just two hardware stores,” she said.

To meet their project timelines, the couple decided to use prefabricated materials. Everything was brought over to Siargao from Manila — even the contractors they hired.

“We had to bring them in and house them because for prefabricated material, there’s a required skillset for it,” Ganaden said.

They named the hotel “Lubihan,” a term in the local dialect that refers to the coconut grove that once grew over the land. The entire property spans just over 4,000 square feet and has 13 guest rooms and one staff room.

“Since my husband is a landscape architect, he was able to make everything work. Even with the 14 rooms, we have a very nice common garden and a lounge area at the back,” Ganaden said.

Nightly rates vary across the different room types.

“We can go as low as about 3,000 pesos all the way to as high as 5,000 pesos,” she added.

One challenge after another

The couple’s hotel journey hasn’t been easy.

When early 2020 rolled around, they faced a major setback: the pandemic. Like much of the world, Siargao — and the Philippines — went into lockdown.

The couple was able to rent out a few of their completed rooms to travelers who were stuck on the island, and they dedicated their time to finishing the rest of the hotel.

But just as tourism in Siargao started to recover from the effects of the pandemic, a natural disaster struck.

In December 2021, Super Typhoon Rai — a category 5 storm — swept through parts of the Philippines, including Siargao, uprooting trees, wrecking buildings, and leaving destruction in its wake.

Lubihan was no exception.

“Our entire roof was peeled off like a sardine can, the majority of our glass doors broke and were dislodged by the strong wind. It was a disaster,” Ganaden said.

All their staff members lost their homes.

“We had no power for months, no phone signal for months too,” she said, adding that the island was almost cut off entirely from the rest of the world due to the damage sustained by the island’s transport infrastructure.

But with grit and determination, and help from their community, the couple was able to rebuild the damaged parts of the hotel and their lives.

“It was months of recovery — emotionally, mentally and physically,” Ganaden said.

They were new to the business

That aside, running a hotel with no hospitality background came with its own set of challenges.

“We are learning as we go, in terms of how to operate and what’s needed by the hotel,” Ganaden said. “For example, the kind of fittings that would last longer, or the kind of linens that would make laundry easier, things like that.”

“I think if you have a background in hospitality, you’d know these kinds of things. But since this is our first time, we’re doing trial and error on a whole lot of things,” she added.

They have six full-time staff members, including an operations officer who lives on-site.

Ganaden’s daily routine starts with dropping off her seven-year-old daughter at school. Then, she scans through the hotel’s reservations for the day and stops by the hotel to check in on things.

“Then, it’s island life after that. In our neighborhood, we have a CrossFit gym right next to us. And of course, if the tides are OK, we go out to surf,” Ganaden said, adding that she pops back into the hotel after to keep an eye on things.

Island life is busy, too

In 2019, Siargao was voted as the best island in the world by Condé Nast Travelers.

Since then, tourism on the island has been on the rise. In 2024, Siargao was also included among Lonely Planet‘s top seven tourist destinations in Southeast Asia.

The island saw a total of 529,822 foreign tourist and domestic traveler arrivals in 2023, per the latest data available from the Philippines Department of Tourism. This is an increase from 181,188 foreign and domestic traveler arrivals five years earlier in 2018.

Siargao may be developing, but the island still retains its untouched feel that many similar beach destinations — like Bali and Hawaii — have lost due to over-tourism.

It’s a far cry from the corporate life that Ganaden was used to back in Manila, but her days are still busy.

“We do also have meetings, especially with other business owners that we collaborate with, but they’re very informal. All in flip-flops or barefoot by the beach, drinking a cocktail — so that’s how our meetings are now,” she said.

She says that her background working in an office taught her to be disciplined, which, in turn, helped her greatly in managing the hotel business.

One thing she really appreciates about life in Siargao is the tight community on the island.

“Even if you live in a village in Manila, you probably will not know your neighbor. In Siargao, everybody just talks to each other, which is very, very nice,” she said.

That said, she does occasionally miss city-living and the convenience that comes with it.

“We don’t have a fast food chain on the island. It’s both good and bad, because sometimes you have cravings for a burger,” Ganaden said.

The infrastructure on Siargao has also improved tremendously in recent years, she said, adding that fiber internet was only properly rolled out on the island the year before.

Prior to that, businesses like hers relied on Starlink for connectivity.

“A lot of remote workers want to live here, but they can’t because of the internet,” she said. “When we started having Starlink all over the island, a lot of them started coming in and working from here.”

These days, Ganaden goes back to Manila with her family at least once every quarter.

“On the island, we all have this unwritten rule that you need an island break,” she said. “We go back to Manila to decompress — because our hustle is on the island — and then we come back again.”

Looking back on their journey, Ganaden says that it was a big leap for them to go from working in the city to running a business on an island with no experience.

“We were scared, but we knew that because of the discipline we had in corporate jobs, we’d be able to survive and find a way to make it work,” she said. “I told my husband I know that if I’m pushed to the wall, I will find a way to climb over that wall or break that wall.”

“That’s how I am, so I was pretty confident about going into the entire thing scared,” she said.

Have you recently relocated to a new country and found or renovated your dream home? If you have a story to share, contact this reporter at agoh@businessinsider.com.