Palawan, Coron, or Boracay?

If you want to spent any time in Manila you won't have any meaningful time on Palawan, you just have too many travel days in that short period, so with this amount of time it makes sense to do Boracay before heading back to Manila.
Getting to the airport in Manila and taking a flight can take the whole day, as they are often delayed. Have you even been to Boracay ? Last time I was there it was anything but "just a nice beach".

What's Manila got to do with anything. They've said nothing, about Manila. They could have flown directly into Kalibo from abroad.

There's no flights from Kalibo or Caticlan to Palawan, so you'd have to bus it down to Iliolo to get their Puerto Princessa flight to reach Palawan.

Probably better to settle for Boracay given the limited time available.

Callippo, improve your reading skills dude. go back again and read what the poster wrote in the first paragraph.
If you don't even bother to read what they write, better to not respond at all.

Ok well they should just fly straight down to Kalibo except Al-Atihan is only seven weeks away so there's not likely to be much if any flights, or rooms. It's not much better than Sunilog that way. In fact like Sunilog, Al-Atihan is not for everybody. I'd avoid it.

One more thing, that in case you haven't been I think it would be a huge mistake to not visit Boracay if you are so close already. Three days at Ati Atihan in Kalibo from your 9 days total sounds like a bit overkill. To my knowledge Kalibo is a very small place and to be in a festival there for three days.. I don't know but I personally could not stand it.
Boracay really elicits mixed emotions, I love it, in fact it's one of the places in Asia that I really miss right now and can't wait to go. Other people direct a lot of hate towards it, because for some reason they think it should have stayed the pristine, untouched beach it was in the 1980's. Despite there being about a million such beaches still, which 99% of these people will never bother to visit, they still hate Boracay for not being that anymore :)
You have to go there to see which one you are.

"which 99% of these people will never bother to visit"

Thank goodness for that!

Thats one of the great things about Boracay, 1.3 million visitors so far this year, mostly from Korea, that will not be visiting elsewhere. I also understand that the new Airport in Caticlan which will open early next year will facilitate even more visitors. Indeed go to Boracay but with 1.3 million others, dont expect to be alone..

OP Kalibo is a very small town that recieves thousands of visitors for Ati Atihan, if you dont have accomodation booked already your chances of finding anywhere now are slim indeed..

As for a comparison of Halong Bay to El Nido, I actually thought El Nido far better, Halong Bay can easily be done in one day, but in El Nido you can spend 3 days Island Hopping and only see a samll part of it. You get far closer to the Limestone Karsts and the whole area is dotted with amazing white sand beaches that Halong just does not have.

The wreck diving in Coron is one the best diving experiences in the whole Country, the wrecks are huge and you can easily spend 3 days diving there and not see the same one twice. Better if you are an experienced wreck diver then you can do full penetration dives..

But as stated above if you spend 3 days in Kalibo you wont have time for much more than a few days in Boracay..

Actually it's 1.3 million for the entire year but at any given time I think there's probably 20-50 thousand tourists on the island (except for peak times when you might get 80-120 thousand I'm guessing). If you consider an average stay of about a week that makes sense. I believe most of the tourists are Filipinos, so it's hard to tell the difference between them and the Koreans, if you even were to care for some reason. It's a good mix and it's really not the low class beer louts and gangsters you see in Thailand, in places like Pattaya.

No, official figures for this year are 1.3 million visitors so far this year and last year 42% were from South Korea..
As for myself I will continue enjoying more time on the EMPTY white sand beaches where I live and spend less time commenting on a forum that hardly anyone is reading..

Thank you all for the replies!

So you think that 3 days in Ati Atihan is overkill? I was wondering about that. Apparently, its the last three days, Fri-Sun that are the biggest, but I was thinking of skipping the Sunday festivities and leaving. I figured that 2 days of partying (I would arrive on Fri at noon) would be enough. I've been to many a Mardi Gras. Drunken, stinky fun is fun for a while, but at always get to a point where I say (okay, now I want a good shower).

As for the 3 options, I would prefer El Nido ideally, but I was leaning toward Coron. World class wreck diving is a unique opportunity. I have been to Halong Bay and Ko Phi Phi, so I was worried that the 2 days getting there would lead to disappointment. As for Boracay, I have seen many concerning pictures of algae bloom. That's a sign of warming water and sewage.