Villa or hotel in Bali? You can hire a staff, but not a craft

I know a lot of people who swear by renting a villa in Bali, and I understand them completely. Your own pool, a butler, a housekeeper, a private cook, a gardener and a driver, for what you’d pay for a hotel room in London. For a week or two you get to live like a king, or at least find out what that feels like. Who could blame anyone for wanting that?

I wanted it too. A few years ago I spent a long stretch in Canggu and rented a villa, because I wanted a proper base rather than a hotel room. At first it was wonderful. A whole household revolving around my wishes. Every morning I’d talk with the cook, a local woman who would make anything I asked for. A driver took me wherever I wanted to go.

The penny dropped during a massage. The masseuse arrived on her scooter, set up in the pavilion by the pool and worked on me for very little money. It was a bad massage. Not unkind, not careless, just without any idea behind it: a woman from the neighbourhood who did this on the side, not a professional of the kind I’d come to expect in good hotels. Once I’d noticed it, I noticed it everywhere. The cook made what I asked for, but her food had no identity of its own. The driver drove well, and had very little to tell me. I had a great deal of staff. It didn’t make the villa better than a hotel.

That was the last time I stayed in a rented villa, and I haven’t missed it since.

Staff or craft?

The sociologist Richard Sennett wrote a book called The Craftsman, and his definition of craft has stayed with me ever since that massage: the desire to do a job well for its own sake. He argues that it takes years of practice to get there, and that it grows best in a workshop, among people who are better than you and who judge your work.

A great hotel is exactly that kind of workshop. The therapist in the spa has been trained, is assessed, works alongside colleagues who are better than she is, and has a career in what she does. The cook works in a brigade, under a chef who tastes the plate before it leaves the pass. The guide has walked hundreds of guests through the same temple and knows what moves people. In a rented villa, the same roles are often side jobs. Everybody revolves around you, and nobody is particularly good at the thing itself.

You can hire a staff. You can’t hire a craft. What I want from a holiday is to be surprised, to learn something, and to build a real connection with people who are excellent at what they do. I find that far more often in hotels than in villas.

What most people don’t know about villas

There’s also a practical side that few visitors know about. At the end of 2025, Bali’s hotel and restaurant association estimated that the island had around 16,000 villas, guest houses and hotels, and that only about 370 of them were licensed. Many foreigners rent a house long-term and then let it out by the night online. The problem became big enough that the governor proposed banning Airbnb on the island outright. The national government refused, and enforcement moved to licensing instead: every short-term rental on the big platforms had to be properly registered by March 2026. In July 2025, the governor personally oversaw the demolition of 48 illegal buildings on the cliffs at Bingin, villas among them.

None of that means your villa is a bad one. It means you often don’t know whether it legally exists, and if something goes wrong at two in the morning, there’s no hotel behind it to fix it.

What the photos don’t show

Rented villas tend to photograph beautifully, and many of them are beautiful. What the photos rarely show is where they are. A lot of villas sit at the end of narrow, unlit lanes between rice fields, a long way from anything, because that’s where land was cheap enough to build. It feels romantic on the first evening. By the third, you realise that without a scooter you’re stuck: every dinner, every coffee and every errand means calling a driver and waiting. And riding a scooter on Bali’s roads at night, after a glass of wine, is not something I’d recommend to anyone I like.

Over the years I’ve learned to approach the most photogenic places with the lowest expectations, because they’re so often a letdown in person, above all on service. In Bali, that applies to a great many villas.

Then there’s the kitchen. A good hotel kitchen works to food-safety standards, with a chef responsible for every plate, inspections, and proper handling of water and ice. In a rented villa, the cook works in a domestic kitchen with nobody checking anything. Most of the time it’s fine. But if you’ve ever lost three days of a holiday to Bali belly, you’ll understand why I’d rather eat from a kitchen where someone is accountable for what reaches the table.

So is a hotel villa the answer?

Not automatically, and this surprises people. A villa in a hotel is often far more expensive than a good room or suite in the same place, and the stay isn’t always better for it. You get more space and your own pool, but often the same service, the same kitchen and the same experience as someone paying half as much. Some newer resorts even call a plunge pool you can barely turn around in a “private pool”.

Look at a famous resort like Las Ventanas in Los Cabos, where a one-bedroom villa can cost more than $8,000 a night and still shares a wall with its neighbour. Expensive, in other words, but not ultra-luxury. I recommend relatively few expensive hotel villas to my clients, which, I’m aware, isn’t the most commercial position for someone who earns a commission on them.

Where is a villa worth it?

The exception is the very top of the island, where the villas are built into a hotel that has mastered this game: COMO Shambhala, Mandapa, both Four Seasons in Sayan and Jimbaran, Raffles, Jumeirah, Bvlgari, Alila Villas Uluwatu, Amankila, Amandari, The Legian, Soori, and Tanah Gajah with its Hadiprana Estate. At these hotels the whole operation is built around a small number of guests, so a villa gets the best the house has to offer.

At the far end of that scale are the estates: places like the ten-bedroom Soori Estate, with five pools and a helipad on five thousand square metres of beachfront, the mansions at Bvlgari, or the Hadiprana Estate at Tanah Gajah. At ten thousand dollars a night and more, they’re a world of their own, and they’re worth it. You get everything a private villa promises, your own butler, cook and driver, with a great hotel’s spa, kitchen, concierge and security behind them. It’s close to having a private island, without having to buy one, and it’s the only kind of villa I know that genuinely lifts a stay to another level.

Where isn’t it worth it?

What you shouldn’t do is book a villa at one of the bigger resorts. At the W, The Laguna, The Apurva or the Ritz-Carlton, a special villa sits inside a much larger machine. You eat from the same kitchen, swim among the same crowds and deal with the same front desk, at a far higher price. These can be excellent hotels; I recommend The Laguna to almost everyone. Just book a good room there, and spend the difference on something you’ll remember.

When does a rented villa make sense?

To be fair to my friends who swear by them: a rented villa can be the right choice for a long stay, when you want a home rather than a hotel, or for a big group who’d rather share one house than six rooms. Then it’s worth choosing a licensed one through a reputable company, checking exactly where it is before you book, and keeping your expectations of the massage realistic. And if you want a private villa with a hotel behind it for far less than the estates above, Kayumanis Jimbaran is the quiet exception: twenty private villas, each with its own pool and a butler, at the price of a room elsewhere.

So, villa or hotel?

For almost everyone, a hotel. Choose a great one, book a good room or suite, and let the craft do the rest. If you want a villa, book it where the whole hotel is built for the few: at the top of the island, never at the bigger resorts. And if you want a world of your own, there are a handful of estates in Bali where it’s worth every dollar.