Bali’s best-value luxury hotels: where a little more buys a lot more

Value is personal, and so is luxury, so there’s no single right answer to this. But there is a question that gets you most of the way: what do you actually get for the money?

A good hotel isn’t always a good experience. The Conrad is a perfectly pleasant hotel, and on price and quality it’s one of the best deals in Bali. But what does that money buy you? A comfortable room, a decent pool, a long walk to breakfast. Spend a few tens of dollars more a night and the return changes completely: a beach, a garden, a breakfast or a team of people you’ll still be thinking about at home. That’s what I’m looking for here. Not the cheapest five-stars, but the ones with an x-factor that lifts them far above their price.

Every price below is my own from-rate: what you’ll typically pay for two at a sensible time of year, with breakfast and taxes included.

Ten hotels worth more than they cost

Best-value luxury hotels in Bali with from-prices for two including breakfast and taxes

Hotel	From, for two	The x-factor
COMO Uma Ubud	~$250	80% of Ubud’s top hotels, at a fraction of the price
The Laguna, Nusa Dua	~$250	The best-kept secret in Nusa Dua
Hyatt Regency, Sanur	~$175	Two resorts for the price of one
InterContinental, Jimbaran	~$200	A big hotel that refused to look like one
Alila Seminyak	~$250	Everything you’d expect from a far pricier hotel
Andaz, Sanur	~$275	A Balinese village, and a breakfast to cross the island for
Anantara Ubud	~$285	A new building shaped around its views
Kayumanis, Jimbaran	~$290	A villa estate for a quarter less than Amarterra
The Samaya, Seminyak	~$300	A villa, a family of staff, Seminyak’s best land
Alila Manggis, East Bali	~$150	A Zecha-era hotel with its soul intact

My own from-prices: what you typically pay for two at a sensible time of year, with breakfast, taxes and service.

The winner: COMO Uma Ubud

For me, this is the one. There isn’t a single weak point, and you get perhaps eighty percent of what COMO Shambhala, Mandapa or Amandari give you, for a fraction of what they charge. It has the intimacy of a boutique hotel and the polish of the very best on the island. The rooms are calm and beautifully finished, the staff are among the best in Ubud, and the whole place has the quiet wow factor of somewhere that knows exactly what it’s doing.

What sets it apart is that it doesn’t try to keep you inside. The staff push you out, to temples, villages and rice fields, and when you come back the hotel is a small culinary walk. Uma Cucina, on the street side, is an Italian restaurant more authentic than many I’ve eaten at in Italy. Uma Bar, further in, is jazzy and easy, with COMO’s healthy cooking all day. And down the garden path, beside a koi pond, Kemiri feels like stepping into a Balinese dream garden. Three places to eat, three moods, and not a weak plate between them. More on why it’s my pick in Ubud →

The Laguna, Nusa Dua

Renovated with a great deal of taste and still flying under the radar: I think it’s the best-kept secret in Nusa Dua right now. Most write-ups stop at “seven lagoon pools” and move on, which misses the point. The whole resort is designed around water, from the goddess of lakes carved above reception to the breakfast room rebuilt in bamboo and rattan as a tribute to the village warung. It’s one of the most beautiful hotels I’ve stayed in anywhere, and it manages that without a single dramatic view.

And it’s the one hotel in Nusa Dua that sends you out. The promenade runs right past it and the Bali Collection is a short walk away, and the staff actively encourage you to use both. At well under half the price of the St. Regis next door, book it before the rest of the market notices; prices like this rarely survive a good reputation for long. Compared with its Marriott neighbours →

The Hyatt Regency, Sanur

Two resorts for the price of one. It shares its grounds with the Andaz next door, so you can wander through both and eat at the Andaz restaurants, and the two share a spa. The pools stay separate. The rooms are simple. Nothing else is.

The real treasure is the garden, and it comes with one of the best stories in Bali. In 1973 a young architecture student from Sydney called Michael White jumped off a ship in bad weather and swam ashore here. A few years later, this hotel asked him to design its garden. As Made Wijaya, he went on to shape the gardens of The Oberoi and private estates for David Bowie and Francis Ford Coppola. If a hotel garden anywhere on this island has ever made you stop and take a photo, it probably traces back to here. Nine hectares, planted so densely you can never hold the whole place in your head, with small pools tucked into the green. Add a club lounge that quietly outshines everything else on the property, and you have the richest setting on this list at the lowest price.

Seven more with an x-factor

InterContinental, Jimbaran, from around $200. The interesting thing about this hotel is who designed it. Hendra Hadiprana, an Indonesian architect and art collector, the man behind Tanah Gajah, was asked to design a big commercial resort, and he clearly refused to make it look like one. Look at the gardens, the pools, the way the paths wind: none of it is typical of a large chain hotel, and that’s exactly what makes it special. On top of that you get a better beach than Four Seasons or Raffles on the same bay, at several times the price, and more park and garden than any hotel in Jimbaran. Book a base room with breakfast, which comes as one of our benefits, and nothing in Jimbaran gives you more for less.

Alila Seminyak, from around $250. A superb location, and everything simply works, the way you’d expect from a hotel costing far more. At its centre stands a family temple five centuries old, still active, incense still burning, with a hotel of glass, concrete and vertical gardens built respectfully around it. On just two hectares, the architects stacked the pools and angled the buildings so that four rooms in five look at the sea. Honestly, I think it’s better than Alila Villas Uluwatu, for a fraction of the price.

Andaz, Sanur, from around $275. Most new beach hotels sit on a narrow strip of sand and build backwards like a funnel. The Andaz turned that constraint into one of the best-designed resorts on the island: not a hotel but a village, laid out according to the Balinese cardinal directions, with lanes, courtyards and corners to wander. And then there’s the breakfast, which might be the best on the island.

Anantara Ubud, from around $285. Recently built and a beautiful building, where every corner has been designed with care. It has almost no grounds, and I admire how it turned that into a strength: the whole building is shaped so that wherever you are, you get the best possible view, of three valleys and Mount Agung. If there were less competition in Ubud and it sat a little closer to the centre, this hotel would cost $500 a night at the very least. Right now you’re benefiting from a name that’s still being built.

Kayumanis, Jimbaran, from around $290. I’ve criticised Amarterra for charging too much for what it offers. Look at what you get here for about a quarter less: one of twenty private villas on a former coconut grove, with a semi-open living pavilion under a high thatched roof, a full-sized pool in its own garden, and a butler who’s more likely to talk you out of hiring a guide because he knows the area better himself. Within a day you stop missing everything a bigger resort would have had.

The Samaya, Seminyak, from around $300. A very warm place, with staff who know everyone by name and are entirely themselves rather than squeezed into a corporate mould. It sits on what I think is the best piece of land in Seminyak: a garden, a pool and a big wooden deck looking straight onto the sand, with the best sunset position on this coast. You get your own villa for less than elsewhere; the courtyard villas are a one-minute walk across the road, which only means you spend more of your day in the garden and on the deck. A far more special experience than hotels that charge more.

Alila Manggis, East Bali, from around $150. An unusual place, and a magical one. It opened in the nineties as The Serai, under the company Aman’s founder Adrian Zecha set up, designed by Kerry Hill, and you can still feel Zecha behind it: in the way the buildings sit on the land, in the calm of the grounds, in a soul that many newer hotels never find. The pool is beautiful, with a fantastic view out over the water, and the east coast around it is still as quiet as Bali gets. For this price, the level of service is remarkable. More on the Alila hotels →

A good hotel, an ordinary experience

The Conrad isn’t on this list, and neither is the Grand Hyatt, though both cost less than most of the hotels above. Neither is a bad hotel. The Conrad is excellent at its lowest rates and merely fine above them. The Grand Hyatt has the finest grounds in Nusa Dua and almost nowhere to stop and enjoy them. They give you a good hotel. The hotels above give you a good experience, and that’s worth the extra few tens of dollars every time.

Why booking through us matters more down here

The extras an advisor adds are roughly the same whatever you pay: a resort credit, an upgrade when a better room is free, early check-in and late checkout. On a $1,500 villa they’re a nice touch. On a $250 room they can add up to a large share of what you’ve spent. The cheaper the hotel, the more the benefits are worth.

And prices move with the season, often more than people expect. Send us your dates, and we’ll tell you where your money goes furthest that week.