Samabe Bali: the Uluwatu answer that isn't in Uluwatu

The most contrarian piece of advice I give on this island, repeatedly, to people who trust me with a real budget: someone asks for a stunning clifftop hotel in Uluwatu, and I send them south to Nusa Dua instead, to a resort most well-travelled guests have never once heard of.

Samabe sits on its own clifftop above the Indian Ocean. Rates run roughly €500 to €600 a night, all-inclusive, moving with the season. At that price, it holds its own against Alila Villas Uluwatu, Six Senses and the Bulgari Resort, and, I'd argue, with a better beach than any of them. What it doesn't have is their design pedigree, the kind of architectural swagger that gets a hotel written about. What it has instead is one of the most complete, quietly correct resorts I've stayed at on this island, and almost no name recognition to go with it.

Part of that is simply timing. Samabe opened in 2013 as the first resort on the island built entirely around a genuine luxury all-inclusive concept, a real gamble at the time, when nearly every other five-star on Bali still ran on the standard a la carte model. It won the World Luxury Hotel Award for Luxury Family All Inclusive the following year. Then, as far as I can tell, it mostly kept its head down and did the work rather than chasing the profile that recognition should have bought it. Other resorts on this coast have since followed the same all-inclusive instinct. Samabe just never bothered telling anyone it got there first.

Uluwatu's view, without Uluwatu's beach problem

An inclinator, a small cliffside lift, carries guests down through the rock face to Samabe's private beach. Or take the roughly 165 steps down yourself, if you're in the mood. Either way, the reward at the bottom is one of my favourite stretches of sand on the island: wide, genuinely white, fronted by water that stays remarkably calm and clear. A reef sits just offshore and takes the worst of the swell before it reaches the sand. That's the detail Uluwatu, for all its cliffside drama, usually can't offer. Most of that coast simply doesn't have real, swimmable beach to speak of. Samabe does, and the reef gives it a slightly dreamier, softer edge than a straight ocean view usually has.

The clifftop itself has its own considerable pull too. The main pool sits right at the edge, and the view might genuinely be the more spectacular of the two. Given the choice, I still went down to the beach more often than not. The serenity down there, away from the pool crowd, was hard to give up once I'd found it.

What ties the whole property together, cliff and beach alike, is how relentlessly well kept it is. Eight hectares of garden, and I couldn't find a single tired corner: no browning hedge, no path in need of resurfacing, nothing waiting for a renovation to fix it. On an island where even good hotels tend to have one patch that's slipping, that consistency is rarer than it should be.

All-inclusive, if the word didn't already mean something else

Samabe calls its programme Unlimited Privileges. The phrase undersells how different this is from what "all-inclusive" usually implies. There's no buffet line, no wristband, none of the standardised, watered-down version of luxury the term normally carries. Breakfast came as scrambled eggs finished with truffle oil and a slice of foie gras, or wagyu with more foie gras alongside it, and that's before lunch or dinner have even entered the picture. Every stay includes a 24-hour butler, a daily evening cocktail hour, and unlimited a la carte dining at both restaurants and through room service, cooked to order rather than reheated from a hotplate. Samabe can also be booked on a straightforward bed and breakfast basis, at a noticeably lower rate. I wouldn't. This resort was built around the programme, not around the room, and without it you're paying Samabe's price for a stay that doesn't have Samabe's actual value in it.

What actually justifies the price is the daily Signature Activity: one complimentary experience per person, per day, drawn from a proper list rather than a token gesture. Cooking classes, private in-suite massages, snorkelling, a guided village bicycle tour, and more. It reframes the whole stay. Instead of watching a bill build up over four or five days the way you would almost anywhere else, you're simply deciding which included thing to do next.

The cave dinner, included once you've stayed four nights, is the one experience here that actually earns the word "unforgettable" rather than just reaching for it. Down on the beach, past where the day's sunbeds sit, there's a natural cave. The resort sets a single table inside it, candlelit, waves audible just outside, the rock still faintly warm from the day's sun. It's built as a tasting menu, several courses, paced slowly, and if I'm honest that format isn't usually mine. I'd rather choose from a menu than sit through a long fixed sequence. It didn't matter here. The setting did all the work a tasting menu is supposed to do and rarely manages: it made me stop checking what course was coming next.

Two kitchens, and neither one loses

Dinner runs across two restaurants: Rempah-Rempah for Indonesian and wider Asian cooking, and Crystal Blue Ocean Grill for a more European, open-air steak-and-seafood register. Lunch is available at either, or down on the beach itself. I gravitated toward the grill side. A proper steak, a lamb rack, food that rewards not having to think about the bill attached to it. My wife spent most of her meals on the Asian side of the menu instead. Both of us walked away equally happy, which says more about the kitchen's range than either meal on its own would.

Built for families and for couples, at the same time

Samabe manages something most resorts only claim to: it works equally well for a family and for a couple who came here purely to disappear for a week. The grounds are large enough, eight hectares, that quiet corners are easy to find whenever you want one. The Lumba-Lumba Kids Club runs daily from nine to five. Staff were fully present with the children rather than just supervising from a distance. The traditional workshops in particular, dressing up in Balinese attire, hair braiding, temple visits, genuinely held my daughter's attention. Every afternoon at three, an ice cream cart appears on its own, unannounced, and does the rounds.

She also talked her way onto a camel ride along the private beach, one of the daily Signature Activities. She still brings up, unprompted, that she was simply too young for the sea walker experience she'd set her heart on. I don't actually mind that she's still annoyed about it. It's the clearest evidence I have of how much real thought goes into the activity roster here, enough that a five-year-old tracks, months later, exactly what she missed.

A butler that actually meant butler

Every suite and villa comes with 24-hour butler service, reachable through a private WhatsApp-style channel. What separates it from the version of "butler" most hotels quietly water down: it never once felt like there was a limit I hadn't found yet. Ask for something at two in the afternoon or two in the morning, and the answer was simply yes. They pushed, gently but genuinely, to collect our laundry and have it back same-day, every day, whether we'd asked or not. One afternoon, lying on a sunbed by the pool doing nothing in particular, someone came over unprompted to ask if we wanted fresh aloe vera for our skin. Nobody had summoned them. They'd simply noticed we'd been in the sun.

It never tipped into uncomfortable, the way overly attentive service sometimes can. No hovering, no feeling watched. It read instead like a staff genuinely trained, and trusted, to anticipate rather than wait to be asked. That's a harder thing to build than an impressive restaurant or a beautiful pool, and it's arguably the thing Samabe does best of everything it does.

81 keys, and a genuine choice between them

The property breaks down into 39 one-bedroom Ocean Suites, each with a generous balcony, a sitting and dining area, and its own telescope trained on the water; seven two-bedroom Penthouse Villas; and 35 freestanding Villas, several with private pools of their own. It's a small enough number of keys, 81 in total across eight hectares, that the resort never feels crowded regardless of which category you're in. The villas in particular are worth considering if privacy matters more to you than proximity to the restaurants and pool.

Our suite was spacious, well equipped, and had a view worth the price on its own, the kind of room you could genuinely spend an unhurried morning in before ever heading down to the beach. What it lacked was any real personality. Neutral tones, tasteful wood. Nothing wrong with any single choice, and nothing that told you this was Samabe rather than any other well-appointed suite on the island. It could have used more of the visual bravado that Alila or Bulgari lean into without hesitation, a stronger point of view rather than a safe one.

That's real nitpicking, though, on a resort this complete. Between the garden, the kitchens, the service and the programme itself, I spent four days actively looking for a weak spot and never quite found one.

What I still find hard to believe is how few people have heard of this place. A resort this considered, this consistent, sitting on one of the best private beaches on the island, and it remains one of Bali's genuine hidden gems. I'm not entirely sure that will last.