Review: Bulgari Bali

Much as I do enjoy taking down my trousers and wiping my arse on hotel brands, not all turds are created equal.  Admittedly, some of them are excellent.  The brands, that is.  And Bulgari are, generally speaking, brilliant, no matter how much it pains me to say it, because they are ultimately a Marriott in Italian clothing.

Bulgari Bali was only their second attempt at this hotel malarky, opening nearly 20 years ago, and somehow it’s still considered one of the best hotels in Bali. Which says one of two things:  Either Bulgari got this very right.  Or Bali never got much better.

Let’s find out.

Getting There

Want to impress me? Make me hate airports as little as possible. Meet me off the plane. Rush me through. Give me snacks. I don’t even need you to care, just pretend convincingly.

Bulgari Bali, I salute you.  We were met immediately at the end of the jet bridge, whisked through the airport and into a car stocked with some pretty tasty snacks.  Plus – and this is something I truly admired – a welcome note giving us the option to preorder dinner en route via WhatsApp.  Which I love.  Because after a flight, there are only two types of people:  Hungry people or Liars.

Setting

This is a property that photographs spectacularly.  You can immediately see why it became the Bali luxury hotel for so many years.  The cliffside setting, the endless water features, and the way they frame the ocean views.  The setting is genuinely beautiful.  But my god this place feels old Bulgari.  Dark wood.  Dark interiors.  Dark everything.  Like the designer walked into a timber yard and said “yes.”

The interiors leave a lot to be desired.  Bulgari came to their senses many a year ago and moved away from this aesthetic.  Rome, Tokyo and Dubai are lighter, softer, more contemporary and much more luxurious because of it.  Bali feels like a time capsule from the era when luxury hotels believed every surface should resemble an expensive cigar box. But there is something lovely about the sense of place here, with the mix of Indonesian design mixed in with the luxury of (in some places) more modern aesthetic.   Do I personally want to live inside a teak wardrobe?  No.  Do I appreciate that this still feels distinctly Bali rather than a generic international luxury hotel?  Yes.

The best way to describe it is visually impressive, but emotionally cold.  It frames the cliffs beautifully, has gorgeous pools and interesting architecture, yet never feels inviting.  But more important than all of that: even if Bulgari Bali works reasonably well, Bali itself still doesn’t.

Rooms

We stayed in a Premier Ocean View Villa.  Which, in an incredible triumph of naming or coincidence, had a premier ocean view.  An Ocean Cliff Villa is the category above, which basically means “same room but marginally closer to the cliff.”  You’re welcome.  In fact, all the one bedroom rooms are identical, excluding the view.

You enter into an outdoor living area with a dining table so low that I couldn’t tell whether it was intended for eating or emergency sleeping arrangements.  But it’s where we ate.  There’s a plunge pool, loungers, minibar, outdoor sofa and a lot of sheltered space.  The problem is all the living happens outside.  Normally that sounds lovely.  Except this is Bali.  Which means mosquitoes immediately begin drafting structural plans for your bloodstream the second you sit down. I would have preferred an actual indoor living room.

But the biggest surprise was the free minibar.  At a Bulgari.  Good heavens, was the GM hit on the head?  I approve of this.

The room itself is…fine.  Comfortable enough.  But again: dark.  Very dark.  “Can someone open a curtain before I walk into a wall” dark.  It has the most annoying door I might ever have seen to enter inside.  I must consider it deliberately this annoying, someone had to of designed this on their last day of their job, with such pettiness and vengeance, that I must salute their hatred for their fellow man.  This extremely loud door with two panes, which always seem to slam into each other, like they were reenacting a car accident.  There’s a little desk area as you enter, otherwise it’s just the usual bedroom and bathroom combo.

But in that bathroom? A Toto toilet.  My safe space.  Although this may be the most aggressive Toto in existence.  The lid springs open with such violence that it sounds like Optimus Prime waking up at 3am from a nightmare that he was in a Michael Bay movie.

The issue, for me, like Bulgari Dubai, is the entry level rooms are perfectly fine (well, ok, they’re much bigger here than Dubai, which could feel like sleeping in a corridor), but to get to the decent rooms, the price increases so significantly, it’s like it just discovered compound interest.  A one bed can be around $2k/n, a 2 bed is closer to $7k.  I ain’t paying $7k/n to stay in Bali.

We also toured the Bulgari Villa and the Three Bedroom Mansion.  Still not my design style whatsoever, but the privacy and scale are immense.  If you’re coming here, that’s what you want.

Facilities

Now we arrive at the biggest issue with Bulgari Bali.  It currently does not really function as a beach resort.  The cable car down to the beach has been closed since the end of 2024, with promises of reopening “soon” alongside a new restaurant and pool area.

Which means: you come to a beach resort…without the beach. An incredible concept. Like going to a brothel and just discussing the weather.  Instead they offer complimentary transfers to other beach clubs. Which is perfectly nice, but when the “best” option, Le Bleu, is nearly 50 minutes away, I might as well have stayed at home and enjoyed the English seaside, needles and all.

We did go. It was fine. Not especially busy, decent enough service. But the beach itself wasn’t anything remarkable, and the entire experience became my own episode of Pointless mixed with Countdown.  This was my Vietnam.  Whilst the transfer is free, there’s a minimum spend for the chairs.  As a non-drinker, this left me in the extraordinary position of aggressively ordering food we did not remotely need. Another pizza? Sure. More fries? Why not. Dessert? Absolutely, we ride at dawn.  I spent two hours calculating whether eating the menu twice and developing diabetes was worth the “win”.

This wasn’t lunch, this was part-time accounting.

So, as you might imagine, this beach absence changes the entire feel of the resort.  Once you remove the beach access, you suddenly realise there actually isn’t a huge amount to do.  That said, the main pool area is gorgeous.  Huge infinity pool, smaller heated plunge tubs beside it, waterfalls, ocean views — definitely the highlight of the resort.

There is a temple on premise, as well as a chapel.  Of course, there are at least two boutiques selling locally sourced….I’m fucking with ya.  Buy a Bulgari necklace, you peon.  Otherwise do you really love your wife?!

Spa / Gym

The gym has entirely new TechnoGym equipment and is well-equipped.  No notes.

The spa reception area is beautiful — a reconstructed 19th century temple overlooking the cliffs.  There’s also a lovely relaxation area and pool.  The actual spa setup is showing that 20 years age.  Some treatment rooms have steam rooms and hot tubs, some do not, and you can’t use them independently unless booking treatments.

Luxury hotels do love inventing ways to stop guests enjoying facilities they’ve already paid for.

Food

Because of the beach closure, there are currently only two restaurants operating. One is Il Ristorante by Niko Romito, the fine dining option, which I’m naturally not taking our 3 year old to.  Although, she does seem to live on a diet of pasta, so maybe I denied her her version of the Super Bowl.

That leaves Sangkar, their Indonesian restaurant. Which is where we ate breakfast, dinner and lunch, when I wasn’t reenacting Supersize Me at beach clubs with minimum spends.

Now, as you might imagine of a cliff based resort, the restaurant leans heavily into this.  It’s objectively gorgeous.  The food itself? Perfectly fine.  Breakfast is the normal selection: crepes, chia pudding, eggs and a lot of local dishes.  There’s no buffet.  A buffet is half the excitement of coming for breakfast.  Not having one is like waking up on Christmas Day, going to open your presents, and finding they’re just pictures of other presents that you wanted.  And they’re covered in the hantavirus.  100% perfect analogy.

Sangkar is entirely Indonesian for lunch and dinner, which meant we fairly quickly reverted to room service. Which was also fine. There’s a separate kids menu with more international dishes on it, and I found myself more tempted by that than the actual menu.

Now, I need to discuss the “hot chocolate”.  I’m not sure if legally it can even be called food.  It tasted like someone liquefied caffeine and hamster shit and then pissed it directly into my mouth whilst maintaining eye contact.  A deeply hostile beverage.  Like the Dark Lord himself had risen from the depths of hell, placed a clawed foot upon my throat, then squatted directly over my eyeline and dripped the blackened essence of pure evil onto my tongue, suffocating me with the vitriol.  Plus, he, too, inexplicably added hamster shit to it.

I asked them to make it again, convinced they had accidentally created this abomination.  Surely just a teeny tiny innocent mistake.  They must have mistakenly grabbed the rat poison instead; we’ve all done it.  Nope.  This is how it’s meant to be.  This was by design.  This, somehow, made its way through quality control.  Who were this team of experts that approved this?  The orcs from Lord of the Rings? This is what my made-up granddad fought and died for, apparently.  So one day, his real-life grandson had to endure this.  Why, Grandpa, why did you have to die in that made-up conflict?!

You never feel like you’re in history when it’s happening, but for a moment, I could tell this was truly historic.  Someone made chocolate awful.

Service

The room was setup really well, with bowls of fruit, cookies, soft toys for the kids and little kids bags with toiletries.  They did a really good job here.  But service here perfectly summarises the entire property.  Nothing terrible.  Nothing amazing.  Everyone polite.  Nobody memorable.  Maybe that should be the properties motto.

You’re assigned a butler via WhatsApp, although “butler” feels generous when they’re handling 7-8 villas simultaneously.  It’s more of a luxury operations coordinator with emojis.

One nice touch:  staff constantly asking for your room number on the way to breakfast so housekeeping knows when you’ve left the villa.  Very efficient.  Except…well, you know it didn’t result in it happening.

Less efficient:  turndown arriving at random godforsaken times;  having to repeatedly coordinate cleaning schedules;  room service trays being collected at nearly 9pm despite being told we’d call in the morning;  laundry being delivered over an hour late on departure day after repeated chasing.

It never descends into bad service.  It just never reaches the level you hope for.  And that’s Bulgari Bali in one sentence.

Kids Friendly

The kids’ club was recently refurbished, but it’s definitely not the most exciting one I’ve ever seen.  It mostly did a good job at looking new, rather than being exciting for the children.  Thankfully, our kids are now old enough that simply having an enthusiastic adult willing to draw pictures with them counts as the greatest experience of their young lives, so they were perfectly happy.

The staff were genuinely lovely.  But it still felt restricted.  The chain-hotel vibe, where every request feels like it first has to pass through legal.  You know the type of place. They will accommodate you eventually, but only after reminding you of the policy three separate times so everyone understands this is being done under exceptional circumstances and possibly against the Geneva Convention.

At Nihi and Banwa, they wanted to know what more they could do, here, out came the rulebook.  Kids can’t eat in the kids club.  Only certain ages allowed in certain areas.  This thing requires approval.  That thing requires coordination.  And none of it is unreasonable individually.  But collectively it makes you feel like everyone is doing you a favour.

The Good

• Surprisingly decent amount of activities included, including private yoga, and on premise painting, plus we went off site to have a tour of a nearby village
• Spa
• Gym

The Bad

• Every guest seems to have a selfie stick

The Luxurious

• Views
• Main pool

Conclusion

I was fully expecting to spend three days moaning about the state of the property, Bali and the influencer culture.  And I kinda could, as it seemed everyone walked around with a selfie stick.  But Bulgari Bali works better than I expected.

It is undeniably photogenic, even if you can tell it’s ageing. And trapped between eras. That view does an extraordinary amount of heavy lifting. For a property celebrating its 20th anniversary, though, they’ve actually done a commendable job future-proofing it. It’s not the best kept property I’ve ever seen, nor the most beautiful, but there’s still something  about it.

Would I come specifically for Bulgari Bali?  No.

Would I combine it with somewhere else like Nihi?  Potentially.

Would I return?  Only if I needed to be in Bali.  If you can get over the dark interiors, get a better room category…and maybe? Without the beach functioning properly right now, however, the resort loses a huge part of its identity. I’d wait for that to reopen before considering it.

But ultimately, my biggest issue remains the same one I had over a decade ago:  I still don’t really understand why people want to come to Bali.  The traffic.  The smell.  The pollution.  The plastic.  The world that awaits you outside of the gate.  Yes, yes, you should not go on a holiday and just lock yourself away, it’s all about engaging in the communities etc etc yardy yah.  But is it?  That’s talk for people who have never been to Birmingham.  Bulgari does an admirable job insulating you from all of that.  But not enough to fully escape it.