InterContinental Bali Sanur: the biggest rooms in Sanur, and the emptiest days

Sanur has three hotels chasing more or less the same guest, and I've now written about all three. So this piece isn't really a review. It's an attempt to answer the question I actually get asked, which is which of them you should book.

The short version is that Hyatt Regency and Andaz are both better hotels, and the Hyatt can be had from around €160 a night with perks. The InterContinental beats them on exactly one thing, which is space, and space turns out to matter more than it sounds.

But the more useful way to understand this place is that it's a resort halfway through rebuilding itself. Some of it has been redone beautifully and the rest hasn't been touched, and once you see that, everything else about a stay here makes sense.

The half that's been done

The lobby is the clearest win and a considerable one. It sits slightly elevated, which turns out to be the whole trick: from up there you look out over the gardens to the beach, then the sea, and on a clear morning to the volcano in the distance. The room is light and elegant, one of those spaces where somebody got the proportions right and then had the sense to stop. Because people are constantly moving through it, checking in and out and meeting one another, it's easily the most alive part of the hotel, and the staff working it are warm and visibly enjoying themselves. You find yourself sitting there without having planned to, which is the highest compliment you can pay a lobby. Without it, this stay would have been considerably harder work.

Layang Layang has had the same treatment and has become one of the more pleasant rooms in Sanur to eat in, properly cool inside with terrace tables looking out for anyone who'd rather have the breeze. Breakfast is a good buffet with real emphasis on Indonesian dishes alongside à la carte cooking, and I ate lunch and dinner there as well. None of it is exciting and all of it is properly executed, which after a few days becomes its own kind of compliment. Pier Eight down on the sand is livelier and the cooking is equally sound.

Then the rooms, which are the reason to consider this hotel at all. The entry category is a 90-square-metre Junior Suite from around €200, which is roughly two and a half times the base room at the Hyatt Regency and half again the size of an entry room at Andaz. This is an all-suite property, 120 of them across four hectares, and nobody in Sanur offers this much space at this price.

What makes that space work isn't the floor area but the covered terrace attached to it. It's large, properly furnished, shaded and open to the air at once, so it functions as a second living room rather than the strip of balcony you look at and never use. I'm not usually someone who sits on hotel balconies and I sat on this one constantly. The bed and linen are excellent too, which matters more than people admit.

The half that hasn't

And then you walk twenty metres in another direction and you're looking at spaces that are visibly dated and haven't been near a budget in years. The money has gone into the rooms and two public spaces. It has not gone into the grounds, and that's where the trouble starts.

There is almost no garden to walk in. On an island where everything grows at a ridiculous rate, this resort has ended up with grounds you exhaust in about ten minutes, with very little to look at while you do. The main pool has a lovely outlook and is otherwise small, short on atmosphere, and equipped with so few loungers that it can never come alive. So you try the beach. Pier Eight is a genuinely good spot, but beyond the boulevard there's only a thin strip of sunbeds, again not many, facing a lot of seaweed and very shallow water. It's by some distance the least inviting stretch of sea I've found in Bali.

Add those three together and you get days with nowhere to go, and that's the honest headline of this stay. I was bored here, and I can point at exactly which three things caused it.

Grounds are what turn a resort day into a holiday, and they're the one thing you cannot buy back with square metres. That's also precisely where the other two win. Hyatt Regency and Andaz sit beside each other and effectively flow into one another, each with its own character, and both have grounds worth losing an hour in. There was always somewhere new to sit, always something going on, always a reason to walk somewhere.

The comparison that really makes the point, though, is with the same group's own hotel further south. InterContinental Jimbaran costs roughly the same money and is built on the opposite philosophy: extravagantly lush gardens, lawns, ornament and art everywhere you look, and one of the finest stretches of beach on the island in front of it. Same brand, same price, and a completely different idea of what a guest does with a day. I've called Jimbaran one of my favourite hotels in Bali and I stand by that, which makes the contrast here difficult to unsee.

The kids' club, incidentally, sits underground, which does it no favours atmospherically. My eldest had a good time there anyway, mostly because the staff kept taking the children outside to walk around and feed the koi, and the programme was genuinely well run. Which rather proves the point: the good bits here are the ones where somebody made an effort in spite of the setting.

So who should book it

There is a right answer to this, and it isn't nobody.

Book it if you're travelling as a family and space is the constraint that decides your week. Ninety square metres and a proper covered terrace changes how a family functions in a way no amount of landscaping does, and at €200 nothing in Sanur competes on that basis.

Book it if you're staying a while and need somewhere to work, read or simply be by yourself during the day without sitting on a bed. That terrace is a genuine room.

Book it if what you want from Sanur is Sanur itself, the beach clubs and restaurants and the cycle path, using the hotel as a comfortable base rather than as the destination. This is a genuinely walkable town and there's a lot on your doorstep.

Don't book it if you plan to spend your days inside the resort. You will run out of hotel by the second afternoon, and both alternatives handle that kind of holiday considerably better.

What I'd pay

Between €200 and €230 a night is my ceiling, and I'd want the space to be the reason I was booking. Above that the arithmetic stops working, particularly with the Hyatt Regency starting around €160 with perks included.

It isn't the best hotel in Sanur and I wouldn't pretend otherwise. What it offers is the one thing none of its neighbours can match, and if square metres are what your trip turns on, that's a real answer. If they aren't, you're paying for space you won't use in a resort with nowhere to walk, and grounds are the thing you can't buy back afterwards.