I went to Kuantan for the first time in my life last weekend. I went there for a pickleball tournament to support a friend who was the tournament director. I played in the men's doubles category and I only made it to quarterfinals. It was such a bad draw into the team that ended up getting second place for the tournament.
We stayed at Shahzen hotel. This hotel wasn't amazing but it was good enough to stay. The thing I liked about this hotel was the hot water. You can take a hot shower for quite a while. I feel like most places the hot water will finish quite fast but this lasted more than normal. The hotel was around 1-2km or less from the tournament venue.
There was a lot of stuff going on because it was like a whole festival. They had dragonboat, a tower run, hot air balloons pickleball and I'm not sure what else. The tower run is kind of insane when I heard the times for the top placements. People were running up that tower in under 3 minutes which is kind of crazy because it's 31 floors.
I also had some nice food at Kuantan. We were given some food vouchers and went crazy at the food stalls in the hot air balloon area. I didn't take a picture of all the food but we spent like RM200+ on food vouchers because we didn't know how to use them until Sunday which was the last day of the event. They even honored the vouchers despite being expired because they were supposed to be used one each day. We were given 3 RM20 vouchers for the event.
Overall, it was a great experience. I felt Kuantan was super hot but it was super chill there (very peaceful). I don't know if I'd want to go back though because I'm not a big fan of travelling long distances.