The Best Luxury Hotels in Bali (Eight Stays Across Five Towns)
The Best Luxury Hotels in Bali (Eight Stays Across Five Towns)
Bali is not one place, and that is the thing people get wrong before they book. Ubud sits inland in the jungle, two and a half hours from the airport. Seminyak, Nusa Dua, Jimbaran and Kuta are all on the coast in the south, and each one pulls in a completely different crowd. Pick the wrong town for the trip you actually want and you will spend a chunk of it in a car.
We have been back to Bali a few times now — first as a couple, later with our two kids — and stayed at eight hotels across five towns. Here is how we would split them up, by the kind of trip you are taking rather than by a ranking.
If you want jungle, temples and quiet: Ubud
Ubud sits near the middle of the island and is where Bali's culture is most concentrated — palaces, temples, traditional dance shows — with thick jungle running down to the Ayung River. It is the opposite of a beach holiday, and most of the good hotels are strung along the riverbanks.
Mandapa is the Ritz-Carlton's reserve property here, which means it is built to sit inside the landscape rather than on top of it — private villas scattered through rice terraces and jungle, with golf carts running between them. You are assigned a Patih, the hotel's word for your own butler, who books your dinners and leaves handwritten notes in the villa reminding you what is on the next day. Book one of the river-front pool villas if you can: ours had its own pool with the Ayung River right behind it, an outdoor shower Chris loved and an enormous indoor bathroom I loved.
Dinner at Kubu, the fine-dining restaurant down on the riverbank, ran to two hours under candlelight — tuna crudo with burrata, eggplant ravioli with cod, wagyu with truffle jus. They will also drive you around Ubud in one of their vintage open-top Volkswagen jeeps, which sounds like a gimmick until you are in one and can hear everything going on around you. The honest catch is the distance: it is two and a half hours from the airport, so Mandapa works as the first stop of a trip, not as a day out from the coast.
Bisma Eight is the one to book if you would rather be able to walk into town. It sits on a small lane running parallel to one of Ubud's busiest streets, so you get the jungle view without being stranded outside the centre. There are only 38 suites. The building is modern concrete set against the trees, which should clash and somehow does not.
Our Canopy Suite had a Japanese onsen tub — a deep soaking tub — in the bathroom, and a balcony that put you inside the tree canopy rather than above it. The infinity pool faces west into uninterrupted forest, and we were usually in it at sunset. The rooftop restaurant, Copper Kitchen and Bar, is run by Chef Ben McRae; the tuna tataki is the dish to order, and he teaches the hotel's cooking class himself. The honest caveat: because the restaurant is genuinely good it is always busy, and it is the one place in the hotel where you are guaranteed to run into other guests.
Purist Villas is the one for a honeymoon or an anniversary. The arrival is part of it — they collected us from our previous hotel, turned off Ubud's main road and drove us through a village mid-ceremony, men in white and women in bright ceremonial dress, roosters in cages along the roadside, before we had checked in anywhere.
Every room is a free-standing villa spread across the property behind its own screen of jungle, and most of them come with a private pool — ask for one of those. The restaurant's chef walks down to the organic market in town every morning and writes that day's menu from whatever he finds; the mie goreng with fried tempeh and the chicken satay were the two dishes we kept going back to. The honest caveat: we barely left our villa the entire stay. That is the point of the place, but if you want a base for seeing Ubud you would be paying for privacy you never use.
If you want the beach without Kuta's crowds: Seminyak
Seminyak is the upmarket end of Bali's southern beach strip — quieter and more laid back than Kuta ten minutes to the south, with a long flat beach and a lot of good restaurants and shops you can reach on foot. It is our favourite place to stay on the coast.
The Legian was here long before Seminyak became Seminyak, and it is still the one we would book. We stayed in an Ocean View One Bedroom Deluxe Suite: a separate lounge, a small kitchen, a bathroom almost as big as the bedroom, and a wraparound balcony facing the water that we kept ending up on. Four infinity pools step down from the hotel to the sand, and the hotel has its own stretch of beach, which matters here because the public ones get crowded.
The main restaurant is run by Luke McLeod, an Australian who cooked in Michelin-starred kitchens before Bali. Order the chicken satay — it arrives still cooking on its own small grill. The two beach bars are the ones to sit at for sunset: wood-fired pizza at the pool bar, caviar and smoked salmon at the champagne bar.
The spa was good enough that we wrote it up on its own. We did The Legian Indulgence, a ritual that includes a four-hand massage — two therapists each, working in unison — and it is the best massage either of us has had anywhere. The honest caveat: between the pools, the beach and the spa we hardly left the property, so it is entirely possible to stay here and see none of Seminyak.
If you are travelling with young kids: Nusa Dua
Nusa Dua sits at the top of the Bukit Peninsula in the south, and it is a purpose-built resort strip where five stars is the norm. Most of its hotels are designed to keep you on the property. That is a drawback if you want to wander out and an advantage if you are travelling with small children.
The Ritz-Carlton, Bali is the one hotel on this list we would send a family to without hesitating. We booked a suite with access to a semi-private pool off the terrace and had a rollaway bed brought in; our two kids, 3 and 5 at the time, slept in the living room behind doors we could close. Ritz Kids, the children's club, has a real minimum age to leave your child there without you — 4 — and if yours is younger you can hire a babysitter through the resort to sit with them inside the club, which we used more than once.
Eat at Bejana, the Balinese restaurant, and order the Rijsttafel — “rice table” — set menu: gado-gado, Betawi spiced coconut soup, minced tuna skewers, Sumatran braised beef, all in small courses. The nightly s'mores on the beach at sunset are worth turning up for, and the breakfast buffet is where the chef brings pancakes shaped like animals. The honest caveat: the place is enormous. The lobby is at the top of a hillside and the beach is at the bottom, so getting between them is a walk down a long central boulevard every time.
If you want to be left completely alone: Jimbaran
Jimbaran is a bay in the south that started life as a fishing village and is now lined with resorts. Its best free thing happens at sunset, when part of the beach turns into rows of stalls grilling the day's catch.
Jamahal has room for twelve couples and does not recommend children under 16, and you feel both. It reads far more like renting a private villa than checking into a hotel. We stayed in two of them, Frangipani and Banyu and Toya, and both had their own pool and garden; Frangipani is split into two separate living areas joined by the kitchen, which would work well for two couples travelling together.
You can have every meal brought to your villa. The chef buys fish and fruit at the market each morning and the vegetables are grown up in the highlands near Bedugul, so everything arrives fresh, often served on banana leaves. In the spa, the Tawer Agung ritual is the local treatment to ask for. The honest caveat: Jamahal does not sell itself on location. Its own stretch of sand is a five-minute walk, but the bars and restaurants are not, so budget for a car and driver.
The InterContinental is the opposite instinct on the same bay, executed well: a very large resort with six swimming pools, two spas and Indonesian-inspired gardens running down to Jimbaran beach. Book the club level. It gets you a private lounge, complimentary breakfast, drinks and canapés, a members' pool, and in our case the Bukit Suite — living room, dining room, bedroom, kitchen, and a balcony running the full length of it.
Plan a night around the Archipelago dinner: an Indonesian buffet paired with a live Kecak dance, a choreographed performance by 50 to 70 men, right in front of you. If you are club members, wander down to the Sunset Beach Bar and Grill at dusk — cocktails there were included, and we drank them with our feet in the sand. The honest caveat: it is so comfortable and so big that we hardly left it. If you want a base that pushes you out to see the island, this is not it.
If Kuta is unavoidable — and coming from the airport, it usually is
We avoided Kuta for years because of its reputation: busy, crowded and aimed squarely at young travellers who came to go out. You pass through it on the way to almost everywhere else on the island, and it does have the beaches and the sunsets it is famous for.
The Sheraton Bali Kuta is the one we would book if you need a base there. Only a small road separates it from the sand, with the Beachwalk shopping centre on one side and the Poppies Lane markets just behind. Our Deluxe Ocean View room was a real 46 square metres, bright and almost entirely white, with a freestanding tub in the bathroom and a covered balcony looking over the gardens to the water.
If you are there on a Sunday, do the Feast Market Brunch — grill, fresh noodle, soup, sushi, Indian and Balinese stations, and a small produce market you can shop at as part of the meal and carry the fruit back to your room. Take the wine inclusion. The honest caveat: the pool gets crowded, and Kuta itself was only an okay visit for us. Treat this as a one- or two-night landing pad, not the trip.
One meal worth booking even if you are staying somewhere else
Copper Kitchen and Bar sits on Bisma Eight's roof in Ubud and is open to anyone. Chef Ben McRae has been cooking for eighteen years, including at Iguacu in New Zealand and Issaya in Thailand, and he comes out at every service to explain what you are eating.
The crisp salmon — crackling skin, tender fish, nahm prik and pickled watermelon — was my favourite thing on the menu; the tuna sashimi with nahm jim dressing and chilli jam is the other one to order. He also keeps proper craft beer and wine on the list, which is genuinely hard to find in Bali. If you are eating by the pool instead, get the wood-fired pizza with shredded chicken, sambal and sweet potato.
How we would actually plan a first trip to Bali
Start in Ubud for three or four nights while you are still adjusting, and give up one of those days to a driver so you can see the rice terraces and the temples properly. Then move south to the coast and stop moving: Seminyak if it is the two of you, Nusa Dua if you have young kids, Jimbaran if you want either total privacy or a big resort with a club floor. Save Kuta for a single night before an early flight. And whatever else you book, hire a car and driver for at least one full day — it is inexpensive in Bali, and it is the only way to see how much of the island you would otherwise drive straight past.
