The Apurva, Ritz-Carlton or Samabe: choosing a hotel on Nusa Dua’s southern cliff

One afternoon at The Apurva, my daughter and I sat at the edge of the pool, half laughing, while a wedding band somewhere below us played for strangers and a singer reached for a note he never quite found. It was the moment I stopped disliking a hotel I'd written off years before I ever set foot in it. A few hundred metres along the same cliff, at the Ritz-Carlton, I spent a whole stay waiting in a beautiful garden for a feeling that never came, after people whose taste I trust had told me how much they loved it. And the hotel on this cliff I now recommend most is one almost nobody has heard of. When someone asks me for a stunning clifftop hotel in Uluwatu, I send them here instead, to Samabe.

Three neighbours at Sawangan, on the southern tip of Nusa Dua, and not one of them turned out the way I expected.

At a glance

16 Samabe Home 13 The Apurva Theatre Ritz-Carlton Machine

The Apurva Kempinski, The Ritz-Carlton, Bali and Samabe compared

	Samabe	The Apurva	Ritz-Carlton
Where	Clifftop with private beach	Clifftop, terraced to the beach	Clifftop and beach level
From the airport	20 to 30 min	20 to 30 min	20 to 30 min
Entry room, per night	From around $575, all-inclusive	From around $350	From around $375
Size	81 suites and villas on 8 ha	About 465 keys on 14 ha	313 keys on 12.7 ha
Beach	White, calm, reached by inclinator	Imported white sand	Good, calm behind the reef
Eating	Unlimited à la carte, cave dinner	Eight venues, incl. underwater Koral	Bejana, with the island’s best rendang
Service	24-hour butler, no limits	Hard-working, a little scripted	Tireless, trained rather than personal
Best for	Couples and families switching off	Families, spectacle	Weddings, groups, occasions
The Bali 20	No. 16	No. 13	Not ranked

Numbers on the photos are positions on The Bali 20. Rates are for the entry category at the time of writing, September 2026, and move with the season.

Why stay on this cliff at all?

For Uluwatu's views without Uluwatu's problems. The southern tip of Nusa Dua sits on the same limestone as the Bukit, with the same drama of cliffs above the Indian Ocean, but twenty to thirty minutes from the airport rather than an hour. And unlike most of Uluwatu, it has real beaches below the cliffs. A reef offshore takes the worst of the swell, so the water stays closer to a lake than an ocean: calm, clear and swimmable, which matters enormously with children. All three hotels are big resorts built to keep you on the property, so the choice between them is really a choice between three ways of spending a week on one cliff.

Theatre, machine or home?

Each hotel answers the question of scale differently. The Apurva treats its size as the whole argument. It's 465 rooms on fourteen hectares, and it hosted the G20 summit in 2022. Its architect staged it as an open-air theatre modelled on Bali's rice terraces, and the arrival is pure sequence: a modest drop-off that gives nothing away, then a lobby whose carved partitions were made by more than 600 artisans, then a balcony above a Grand Staircase of 250 steps, modelled on the water temple at Besakih, with water cascading all the way down. Yes, it's kitsch. It's about as far from an authentic Balinese village as a five-star hotel gets. It's also genuinely enchanting to stand inside.

The Ritz-Carlton is a machine, and a very capable one. It was planned as a Regent and rebranded late, just before it opened in 2014, and it's built above all for weddings and conferences: two chapels, a ballroom, wide processional spaces designed to move hundreds of people impressively from one place to the next. A glass lift carries you down the rock face to the best thing about it, a wide, mature garden with koi ponds, the most considered piece of landscape I've seen at a resort this size. And yet, for all its excellent parts, it impresses far more often than it embraces.

Samabe is the smallest by far, with 81 keys across eight hectares, and it never feels crowded whatever you book. It has no architectural swagger, nothing that gets a hotel written about. What it has is one of the most complete, quietly correct resorts on the island, kept so immaculately that in four days I couldn't find a single tired corner.

Which has the best beach?

Samabe, and it's one of my favourite beaches in Bali. An inclinator carries you down the cliff, or you can take the 165 steps, to a wide, genuinely white beach fronted by calm, clear water behind the reef. I went down there more often than I stayed at the clifftop pool, which has the more spectacular view. The Ritz-Carlton's beach is better than most on this coast, and staff were out tidying the sand more than once a day. The Apurva's beach is bright white, imported and maintained rather than natural. It's pleasant, but sitting there it's easy to half-forget which island you're on. That's the trade the whole resort makes, and it makes it without apology.

Where will you eat best?

For range, the Apurva. For one great dish, the Ritz-Carlton. For eating without thinking about the bill, Samabe. The Apurva runs eight kitchens that genuinely differ from each other: an underwater restaurant built beneath a working reef, a Japanese izakaya from one of Jakarta's best kitchens, a proper hotpot and dim sum room, and possibly the best breakfast spread I've had at a hotel of this size. None is the best I've eaten in Bali. What's rare is the range, and how considered it feels. The Ritz-Carlton has Bejana, an Indonesian restaurant set into the cliff, whose rendang I now measure every other version against: more authentic and richer in flavour than any I've had, where Bvlgari's up the coast is a luxurious comfort dish instead. Its sambal cart is worth flagging down on its own.

At Samabe, everything is included, and “all-inclusive” here means nothing it usually means. There's no buffet and no wristband. Breakfast came as scrambled eggs with truffle oil and foie gras, and lunch and dinner are unlimited à la carte across two restaurants, one Indonesian and one a grill. Once you've stayed four nights, they set a single candlelit table for you in a natural cave on the beach, with the waves just outside. It's the one experience on this cliff that earns the word unforgettable.

Where is the service best?

Samabe, and it's the thing it does best. Every suite and villa comes with a 24-hour butler, and I never once felt there was a limit I hadn't found. Ask at two in the afternoon or two in the morning, and the answer was simply yes, without ever tipping into hovering. On top of that, every guest gets one included activity a day, from cooking classes to in-suite massages and village bike tours, so instead of watching a bill grow you simply decide what to do next.

At the Ritz-Carlton I've never seen staff work harder. On one short walk to the pool, six different people said a warm hello, and order a buggy and it arrives before you've finished the sentence. But across the whole stay I never had a real conversation. It's warmth delivered at volume, trained rather than spontaneous. The Apurva's staff worked hard too, but more than once the service felt as if it was following a script rather than reading the room.

Who stays there, and why?

At the Ritz-Carlton, the name. At The Apurva, the wonder. At Samabe, nothing to show off, and that's the point. This is one of the more affordable Ritz-Carltons anywhere in the world, and you can feel that a good many guests come for the name on the door, and for the sense of occasion that comes with sleeping somewhere called the Ritz-Carlton. That lends the place a slightly grander air than it needs. At heart it's a superb venue for conventions, events and weddings, and there's nothing wrong with that. It just isn't the private palace some guests arrive hoping it will be. Where it truly shines is when the occasion is big enough to fill it: a wedding, a group, a celebration. For families, its villas are also some of the best value for space in this bracket.

The Apurva draws guests who come the way people go to a theme park: to be amazed. You can feel the excitement in the air, on the Grand Staircase and around the pools, and it makes it a genuinely happy place. It's perhaps a touch less sophisticated than its neighbours, but it's alive. Families love it, with a landscape of pools that fold into coves, where hunting your child down becomes a daily ritual rather than a chore. It's also an institution for Indonesian weddings, so don't be surprised if one drifts across the water one afternoon.

Samabe is the most expensive of the three and the most exclusive, with only 81 keys, and yet it's the least pretentious. It almost feels like a relaxed four-star in spirit, because nobody here is trying to impress anyone. You can't boast about a hotel nobody has heard of, and it sits so far out of the way that the world doesn't much care that you're there. What's left is a place that works equally well for a family and for a couple who came to disappear. My daughter was still talking months later about the sea walk she was too young for.

Which is the best value?

Samabe, once you count what's included, and the Ritz-Carlton at entry level. Samabe's $575 to $700 a night covers all your food, drinks, a butler and a daily activity for each of you, which puts it on a par with Uluwatu's big names and, I'd argue, ahead of them. The Ritz-Carlton's entry Junior Suite, around 100 square metres from about $375, is a serious amount of space and finish for the money. Book it for the space, though, not the view: the ocean-view categories sit far enough back that the sea barely registers. The Apurva is the most affordable of the three, from around $350, and its entry-level room is the smarter booking. Our suite's plunge pool sat so deep in shade that we used it twice in four nights, and with this many pools on the grounds, a private one you can't sit in isn't worth paying for.

Apurva, Ritz-Carlton or Samabe?

Samabe if you want to be looked after. The Apurva if you want to be dazzled. The Ritz-Carlton if you have something to celebrate.

The full reviews are here: The Apurva Kempinski, The Ritz-Carlton, Bali and Samabe. For Uluwatu itself, see Bvlgari vs Alila Villas Uluwatu.

What stays with me from this cliff are three small things. A stranger's off-key wedding song drifting across the water at The Apurva, and my daughter laughing at it. A straw beach bag my wife wouldn't put down, and a leather bookmark nobody had to think to leave, from a Ritz-Carlton that never quite won my heart. And a single table set in a cave on Samabe's beach, candlelit, with the waves just outside, at the hotel I'd never heard of and now send people to, even when they've asked me for Uluwatu. I'm not sure it will stay a secret for long.