Hyatt Regency Bali: the club I never expected to be the reason I'd go back

Hyatt Regency isn't a brand that's ever excited me. Every Regency I'd stayed at before this one was solid and dependable. Rarely more than that. I went for a Neapolitan pizza place that had opened on the beach here, not for the hotel itself, which was barely on my radar. I got fascinated by the hotel while I was eating it, and booked a few nights not long after. What I didn't expect was that the thing I'd end up telling people about wasn't the pizza, or even the garden. It was a club lounge. I don't even like club lounges.

A garden that predates the whole idea of a Bali resort

I only figured out afterward what actually won me over first. In 1973, an architecture student from Sydney named Michael White jumped off a ship in bad weather and swam to shore here. He never really left. A Brahmin family adopted him. He converted to Hinduism, took the name Made Wijaya, and spent his first years on the island coaching tennis and teaching English just to keep his visa valid. One of those tennis courts belonged to the brand new Bali Hyatt, the very first international hotel on the island. A few years later, that same hotel asked him to design its garden. What Wijaya built here in the early 1980s became the template for what a "Bali resort" was supposed to look like. He later went on to shape the gardens at the Oberoi, and eventually 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 what started right here.

A garden built like a maze, on purpose

You feel that legacy the moment you start walking. The grounds are genuinely large, nine hectares, but planted so densely that you can never quite hold the full size of the place in your head. Paths branch off. They loop back. One opens onto a pond you didn't know was there a minute earlier. There are several pools, but each stays relatively small and screened off by vegetation. Instead of one big communal pool deck, it feels like a world of its own.

Where Andaz next door leans into quirks, sometimes wonderfully over the top, Hyatt Regency feels more restrained. Less designed to impress, more simply inherited. The two properties blur into each other on the ground. Walk a few minutes down the beach path from Andaz and you're on Hyatt Regency's side of the property line without much signalling that you've crossed it.

The Regency Club, of all places

I carried that same feeling, the sense of never quite mapping the place, straight into the Regency Club, and it turned out to be the best version of it. I don't normally have much of a thing for club lounges. They tend to be an afterthought bolted onto a business floor. Here, someone clearly put real effort in. It's an open wooden structure entirely in the open air, wrapped in lush Balinese garden, with ponds and running water on every side. Live gamelan plays softly in the background most evenings. It doesn't feel like a lounge attached to a hotel. It feels like another pocket of the same garden, one you only find if you know to look for it.

Evening cocktails and canapés, from five to seven, turned out to be a proper highlight in their own right. A full hot and cold buffet changes daily, usually three or four hot Asian and Western dishes, think chicken satay, fresh prawns, noodles or pork buns on a given evening. A generous salad bar, charcuterie, and four to six proper desserts, things like crème brûlée or mango mousse. I'm normally unimpressed by hotel buffets. Here the attention to detail was real, and it came with genuinely good cocktails included in the price. By the time it wound down, dinner afterward felt almost unnecessary. I wouldn't recommend this hotel to a client without Regency Club access. You'd genuinely be missing the best part of the stay.

Where it falls a little short: the rooms

Breakfast felt calm in the same way. Serene enough that you'd never guess you were sleeping in a large hotel. It's a step behind Andaz's genuinely spectacular breakfast next door. That makes it feel slightly plain by comparison, never bad on its own terms.

The 373 rooms sit in low buildings named after flowers rather than numbered wings, draped in hanging plants until the buildings look like something the garden grew around. Walk into one and the spell breaks a little. Wooden furniture, Balinese carving, nothing that clashes. Nothing that particularly delights either. Suites open things up, some with proper living rooms, but underneath the renovation you're still standing in the original Bali Hyatt structure.

None of that excited me much personally. At these rates, spread across a resort this size, that's less a shortcoming than simply where the money isn't going. It's going into the garden, and into that club, and into a buffet you don't need dinner after.

The better deal in Sanur, if you know what you're booking

The InterContinental is the best deal in Jimbaran, if you manage to catch a good rate. Hyatt Regency is, without much competition, the best deal in Sanur. Somewhere between $200 and $250 a night, if you book through me. That gets you real extras attached, on grounds this good, with a club this good hidden inside them. Andaz suits young couples chasing design and detail. Hyatt Regency is genuinely one of the more family-friendly properties in the area. I can't tell you which one is better. It depends entirely on who's booking.

I still think about that club more than I think about the pizza that got me here in the first place. Most hotels put their best room on display. This one tucked it away behind a garden, as if it wanted you to earn the discovery. Ask me about it, and I'll walk you through the rest.