Regent Bali Canggu: money buys almost everything except time

No hotel on this island gets asked about more often than this one, which is why I'm writing about it at all. Since it opened I've had the same conversation a dozen times over: with clients, with people in the trade, with anyone in Canggu who has an opinion about where the neighbourhood is heading. That's everybody. Regent has kept the local community busy in a way no other opening has managed for years, and after enough people asked me directly, it seemed dishonest not to answer in public.

So here is the answer, and I'd rather you disagreed with me having read the reasoning than skipped to the end for it. At the rates this hotel has been asking, I steer clients away. Somewhere around $250 a night including the usual perks I'd begin to consider it, and even then I'd more often point people towards InterContinental Jimbaran, Hyatt Regency, Andaz or The Laguna. That's a real statement about the only genuine luxury resort in Canggu and I don't make it lightly.

What ambition can and can't buy

You can hold one of the best pieces of land in Canggu, six hectares of it running down to the sand at Batu Bolong, and spend enormously on it. You can hire WATG to draw the thing, HBA to fit out the interiors, and an award-winning Irish landscape architect to plant the gardens. Then bring in a chef with a Michelin star in Singapore and recruit several hundred new staff to run 150 suites and villas around nine swimming pools. All of that is a considerable achievement and none of it, on its own, makes a hotel. It makes a hotel with ambitions, and the distance between those two things is what a first year is for.

The opening didn't help. The soft launch asked well over a thousand dollars a night for an entry-level suite in a property that was demonstrably not finished, and the response was as unforgiving as you'd expect, after which the rates came down a long way. That was a misjudgement, and the market corrected it quickly. In fairness, this project had been a very long time coming, with forum threads tracking its progress as far back as 2020, full of people driving past and reporting that it looked promising and still had a long way to go. The site is bisected by a public road, which the architects resolved by raising the road and running a covered walkway beneath it to join the two parcels, and work of that kind takes what it takes.

I came several times for drinks and dinner at Beach House and Sazón long before I ever slept here, and neither impressed me. The food and the drinks were fine. The service was uninspired in the specific way that money cannot fix. When the prices eventually dropped I booked a Studio Suite for a weekend at around $600 and went to find out whether the rest of it held up.

The parts that already work

The site is handsome and genuinely ambitious, and you can see the quality of the architecture from the moment you turn in off the road. The arrival sequence is beautifully judged, the low guest blocks sit around garden courtyards in a way that keeps the scale human, and the detailing is restrained rather than shouty. Whatever else I'm about to say, this is a properly designed resort and the design is not the problem.

The pools are the best thing here by a distance. There are nine of them, they've been laid out with real care, and along with Beach House they took nearly all of my time. Beach House itself is a lovely room with the sand in front of it, and it's easily the most sociable corner of the property, mostly because the pool sits close enough to the busy beach to borrow some of its energy. One thing to know before you build a holiday around it: outsiders can come in, which takes some of the exclusivity off it in exactly the way it does at COMO Uma Canggu down the road.

The gardens are tidy rather than lush, and I'd give those time. I had precisely the same reaction at Jumeirah Bali, and planting fills in.

Where my reservations sit

My hesitation isn't about any single thing going wrong. It's that at the prices being asked, everything has to be exceptional, and here a good deal of it is merely good.

The Studio Suite was comparable to The Laguna, Conrad or Hyatt Regency: well designed, very pleasant, and simply a nice room rather than a luxurious one. The obvious counter is that this room is enormous by Canggu standards, and it is. But space is the one thing this site was always going to be able to offer, given six hectares to play with, and space is not what separates a good hotel from a luxury one at this price. Finish is. Around $200 with benefits at COMO Uma Canggu gets you a room half this size that nonetheless felt considerably more expensive, with better upholstery and a superior bed and linen, and I'd take the smaller room every time. That comparison is the entire problem in one sentence.

The food is honest rather than exciting. The Indonesian restaurant in the middle of the resort is good but flat, with small portions and presentation that seemed to be working hard to compensate for a lack of tension in the flavours. Breakfast is compact too, with à la carte cooking that lacked precision, eggs included. I never made it to the fine dining room, partly because Canggu's own restaurants are better than most hotel kitchens anywhere, so the kitchens mattering less here than they would at a remote resort is a genuine mitigation rather than an excuse.

It is only fair to add that the trajectory is upward. Between those first visits and my stay a few months later, the restaurants had clearly improved. Sazón has since moved on from the Spanish tapas concept it launched with to something more broadly Mediterranean, with a chef's counter that makes the room considerably more alive. They are pushing, and it shows.

Service, and the one thing they do brilliantly

The staff try hard, it hasn't settled yet, you can feel that, and nothing about it was bad. A year from now it will be better again, which is more or less the story of this entire property.

There is one thing they already do better than almost anyone, and if you do book here it's the reason to use them properly. Canggu runs by its own rules, the best restaurants are heavily hyped and genuinely difficult to get into, and the guest relations team have invested in real relationships around the neighbourhood and will proactively get you a table. Having that taken off your hands is worth a great deal in this particular town.

Guests I spoke to were also enthusiastic about the Regent Club lounge, which sounds a good deal more generous than the main restaurants. It has à la carte breakfast, afternoon tea, cabanas beside a private infinity pool and complimentary champagne in the evening. I didn't book it. It was expensive enough already.

The IHG puzzle

I'm a fan of this group, which is what makes this difficult to write. InterContinental Jimbaran is one of my favourite hotels on the island, and I've had genuinely brilliant stays at Regent Phu Quoc and Regent Hong Kong. So it puzzles me that two of the three significant IHG properties in Bali haven't yet reached the level I'd expect from the brand. Regent Canggu is one and InterContinental Sanur is the other.

My best guess is that the name above the door tells you far less than people assume. IHG operates these hotels rather than owning them, and what a hotel is actually made of comes down to the owner who built it and how willing that owner is to keep spending after the ribbon has been cut. Jimbaran has had decades to prove itself. This place has had a year.

Why I hope it works

Regent is the only genuine luxury resort in Canggu, and Canggu could use one. The neighbourhood already does a version of ambitious well, at Desa Potato Head, and a version of honest and affordable well, at Shore Amora. Regent's job is to prove it can do expensive well too. There is nothing wrong with the bones here. There is a version of this hotel in three or four years that I would happily recommend to anybody: the hardware maintained properly, the kitchens sharpened, the service settled into itself, and the pricing at a level that reflects what it actually delivers.

I would like to be writing that article. For now, if you have IHG points to spend, this is a relatively inexpensive way to use them and I'd take it without hesitation. If you're paying cash at anything near the published rate, there are better hotels on this island, and several of them cost less.