Grand Hyatt Bali: beautiful, enormous, and nowhere to sit

The spot I never found

Wherever I stay I find my spot within a day. The third lounger from the end where the palm shade lands at four. The corner of the pool nobody else wants. A sofa in the lobby that catches the light at six. I am aware this makes me sound like a cat. It has never taken any effort before.

My first walk around this place was the warning. It is lovely and it is completely disorienting, and after twenty minutes I had no idea where I stood in relation to anything. That alone did not worry me. The Hyatt Regency in Sanur is a maze too, and deliberately so. The difference is that in Sanur every wrong turn hands you somewhere you want to sit down.

Here the wrong turns handed me more garden.

A water palace with a convention centre attached

It opened in April 1991 as the largest hotel in Bali. Six hundred and thirty-six rooms in four villages across seventeen hectares, built to serve the convention centre next door. That is not an insult. That was the brief.

The design takes its cue from Tirta Gangga, the water palace in Karangasem. Lily ponds spill into channels that run into lagoons. Everything moves and everything leads somewhere else, which is a beautiful principle and a difficult one to sit still in.

What is missing, and it is not the gardens

The grounds are genuinely among the finest in Nusa Dua. The planting closed over decades ago so you move through green corridors rather than across a resort. Five pools meander through it. Herons stand in the ponds at breakfast. A line of resident ducks crosses the lawn from one pond to the next like staff changing shift, and there are squirrels that will occupy a six-year-old for an hour.

And yet almost none of it invites you to stop. The furniture has no warmth in it. Stretches of the property feel bare, even a little sterile, and the whole thing is somehow solemn. Grand and serious and slightly churchlike, when what it needed was lightness.

Compare it with Four Seasons Jimbaran, where you cannot walk fifty metres without finding a hidden corner, a small shrine, a bench, a bale, somewhere to look at something. Or with the Regency in Sanur, which is busier with ornament and considerably more playful. Both of those keep offering you a reason to sit. This one keeps offering you a view on your way past. The Regency has nine hectares to work with. This place has seventeen, and fewer reasons to stop walking. Whatever is missing here, it isn't land.

Even the loungers work against it. There are hundreds of them and most are empty, scattered so widely that you never end up near anybody. A resort this size should hum. Instead you lie down in a field of unoccupied chairs and the effect is closer to a municipal park in low season.

At seven in the morning the scale is a gift. By four in the afternoon it means a twenty-minute walk to fetch the book you left behind, which is why I stopped fetching it.

A beach worth swimming from, and nowhere to lie on it

The beach surprised me. Six hundred and fifty metres of it, wide, with the calm clean water Nusa Dua promises and often fails to deliver. You actually swim here. On this island that is rarer than it should be. The beach walk carries on to The Laguna and the St. Regis, so you can walk to somebody else's dinner, which this enclave almost never allows.

This is where my spot should have been. Then I met the loungers. They are fine to sit on and wrong to stay on, and they appear to have been chosen by somebody who has never lain down. In a hotel where everything else has been thought about twice, that is a strange place to stop thinking.

The kindest staff in Nusa Dua

What this place has instead of polish is people. Not trained, silent, anticipatory luxury service. Something better: a very large team who are warm without exception and visibly trying, who ask questions because they want the answer. I had a real conversation every day. In a hotel of this size that should be impossible, and it is the thing I would come back for.

The food operation is serious too. Nampu for Japanese, booked out days ahead and worth the planning. Salsa Verde for Italian. Pasar Senggol for an Indonesian grill with live music. The restaurants were reworked in a thirty-five-million-dollar refit with Super Potato of Tokyo among the designers, and you feel that in the rooms as much as on the plate.

Where it works, and both times the room is small

Two exceptions to the wandering. Together they make the whole argument.

The first is the Grand Club. It sits entirely outdoors and wrapped in koi ponds, and it comes close to being a hotel inside the hotel. Breakfast is careful. Drinks run all day. There is an afternoon tea, and between five and seven a spread appears that is more generous than any accountant would advise. It is rarely a third full, so it doubles as the quietest room on the property. Up there the resort stopped being enormous.

The second is Salsa, the rooftop, which for me stands for the entire place. Canopy below and the sea in the distance. Thirty people in a compact space. An atmosphere nothing else here comes near. I went up every evening and I was smiling before I arrived. It is one of the best hotel bars on this island and I suspect the reason is simply that it has walls.

So the largest hotel Hyatt ever built in Bali works best in its two smallest rooms. The lobby has hosted presidents, most recently during the G20. Nobody has ever struggled to find them a chair.

The part where I might be wrong

Let me be straight. Plenty of people find here exactly what I could not.

The place has taken an Australian family-travel award two years running. On TripAdvisor the raves run into the thousands, mostly from families who stayed a week and are already booking the next one. And on the Hyatt forums, where nobody is paid to be kind, somebody wrote that this property is magical and soulful. That is the exact opposite of my week, and it is the sort of sentence that makes a critic check his own pulse.

There is a clue in who else is here. A good share of guests wear a red all-inclusive wristband, and the hotel sells week-long packages with meals, drinks and the kids' club folded in. That is a genuinely good deal. It is also a different product from the one I came to review. Eight days here with two children and a waterslide is probably the warmest holiday in Nusa Dua. A week here on my own terms, looking for a chair, is not the same visit at all.

What the money buys

Ours was a King Club. Comfortable, well kept, a very good bed, some years past its last refresh. The entry Grand Rooms run to 49 square metres, which is more space than most of this island gives you at any price.

A standard room starts around $175 with benefits attached and a club room around $280. Given what that lounge hands out, take the club room. There is a third route as well: this is the best-known points redemption in Bali, and plenty of guests arrive on a free night with an upgrade into the club. On those terms it may be the best value in Nusa Dua, and you should weigh that against everything I have just said. The position helps too, with the landscaped peninsula and the beach promenade along the shore and Bali Collection directly across the road, eight hectares of open-air shops and restaurants. In an enclave built so that nobody ever needs to leave their hotel, this one gives you somewhere to walk in the evening.

Who this is for

Families, groups and anyone who wants scale. Space, extraordinary grounds, five pools, a beach you can swim from and staff who will make a fuss of your children. It is a very good hotel at a fair price and I would send you here happily. Points collectors can stop reading and book it.

And who it is not for. Anyone who measures a hotel by whether it has a heart. Or, if I am honest about what I actually mean, by whether it has somewhere to sit. This one has beautiful gardens, an excellent beach, a superb lounge and one of Bali's best bars, and no centre of gravity at all, because it was never built to have one. I have slept in forty-one hotels on this island and this is the only one where I never found my spot. The building had been telling me why since the day I arrived. I just wasn't listening.