Bali's Best 20 Luxury Hotels 2026

Bali's Best 20 Luxury Hotels

One measure only: how completely a hotel delivers what it promises, at the price it asks. Not which is the most beautiful, and not which is the most expensive. They are rarely the same hotel, which is why this is worth reading.

The twenty run from around $250 a night to several thousand, and a hotel at the lower end is held to exactly the same standard as one at the top.

55Considered

20Ranked

100%Stayed in & paid for

$250A night, and up

How this was made

A hotel qualifies only if it has been stayed in and paid for, by us or by someone whose judgement we know first-hand. No press stays, no hosted nights, no exceptions. That rule is the reason some well-known names are missing, and their absence should not be read as a verdict.

Three sources feed the list. Our own stays, which are the largest part. A small circle of friends whose taste we take as seriously as our own: people who have seen the alternatives and are difficult to impress. And the travellers we have planned trips for, who come back and tell us what the hotel actually did.

The ranking is still one judgement, not a vote. Nobody's reading is averaged; every account is weighed, and one editor decides every position. Where another reading and our own instincts pulled apart, theirs was weighted heavier. One hotel on this list sits higher than personal taste would have placed it, because that taste runs to older and quieter places, and a preference is not a standard.

No scores, and no categories out of ten. A hotel is not the sum of six numbers, and pretending otherwise would only disguise the judgement as arithmetic.

EDITED BY SVEN KROONE

FIVE AWARDS

Where a hotel is best at one thing

Best Table

Rumari, Raffles Bali

The finest restaurant on the island, with no caveats attached. French technique bent around Indonesian ingredients by a chef who talks to you first.

Best Breakfast

Andaz Bali

Four kitchens send small plates to the same table: cheese crêpes, a prawn omelette, pancake soufflé. The best start to a day on this island, at one of the more modest rates on this list.

Best Architecture

The Oberoi Bali

Peter Muller drew it around 1971, years before Amandari. Some call it dated, and we understand why. Fifty years on, his idea of what a hotel in Bali should be still hasn't been bettered.

Best Value

Como Uma Ubud

Eighty to ninety percent of the very top of this island, with Como's standards intact, at a rate nobody has to justify afterwards.

Least Impressed With Itself

Tanah Gajah

Twenty villas on the rice fields, a chef who lives on the estate, staff trained under Adrian Zecha who never left, and no interest whatsoever in telling you how special that is.

What isn't here

Thirty-five hotels were considered and left out. Some because nobody whose judgement we know has stayed in them yet, and we will not rank a property on somebody else's photographs. Some because they are excellent at something this list does not measure. And some because, having paid the bill, we did not think the bill had been earned.

The list is republished once a year. Positions move, and so do hotels: a kitchen changes hands, a building reaches the end of its cycle, a new opening finds its feet. Individual write-ups carry the date of our most recent stay, which is the only honest way to publish a hotel review.

Factual errors are corrected immediately and visibly. Judgements are not. No hotel can pay to enter this list, to move up it, or to leave it, and none has been asked for anything.

Any of these can be booked through us

At the hotel's own rate, with upgrades, resort credit and breakfast attached where the property offers them. The twenty above are the standard we advise by, not the limit of what we book.

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