The Raffles Bali: the island's most underrated hotel

I had a conversation with one of the gardeners here that I still think about, five minutes, maybe less, and it told me more about this hotel than the entire brochure could. He explained, clearly proud of it, that the grounds team refuses to use chemical sprays. Sustainable alternatives instead, even though it means living with more mosquitoes. And it works. There are plenty of mosquitoes around. Somehow, they barely bite. I still don't fully understand how, and I've stopped trying to.

A decade in the making, and you can feel every year of it

The Raffles Bali took over ten years to build. Land discovered on the Bukit Peninsula back in the 1980s, development finally starting in 2010, construction dragging on until the resort opened at the end of 2021. All of it shaped around Tri Hita Karana, harmony between people, nature, and the divine. Most hotels claim a philosophy. This one actually seems to have built around it, one slow, deliberate decision at a time.

A hideaway that hides its own size

Driving in for the first time, past the security gate and up toward the lobby, I genuinely lost track of how long we'd been driving. The road just kept going. Turn after turn through the hillside, no end in sight, and that's the exact moment the scale of this place actually landed for me.

Here's the strange part. Stand on Jimbaran Beach and look up at the hill, and Four Seasons is what grabs your eye, its buildings sitting proudly on the slope, impossible to miss. Raffles barely registers from that same spot. It disappears into the green. And yet it's considerably bigger. Just 32 villas across 23 hectares, against Four Seasons' 156 keys crammed into 14. Do the math and Raffles gives you roughly eight times the land per villa. From the beach, you'd never guess it. That's either brilliant restraint or a serious branding problem, depending on how you look at it.

A fanaticism that runs through the whole team

That gardener's instinct, going further than anyone asked, just because it's the right thing to do, isn't a one-off. It runs through every single staff member I met here. Another guest told me a story that stuck with me even more. Her butler clocked, within minutes of her arrival, that she was stressed and overstimulated. So he didn't fill her days with excursions and dinner reservations like most butlers would. He dimmed the lights. Adjusted the room to a calmer temperature. On his own initiative, without being asked, he brought in a meditation guide and a sound bowl therapist. For the rest of the week he wasn't really a butler anymore. He was closer to an emotional bodyguard, quietly filtering the outside world out before it ever reached her.

Chef Gaetan Biesuz runs on the exact same wiring. He'll actually talk to you, properly, to figure out what you'd enjoy rather than just handing you a fixed menu and hoping for the best. Trained in Lyon at a two Michelin star brasserie, he now bends French technique around Indonesian ingredients, and Rumari is, hands down, the best restaurant I've eaten at in Bali. No caveats. The wine list matches that ambition beat for beat.

And then there's the bar. Order a Sling here and it's uncanny, the exact same ritual I chase down every time I'm at the original Raffles in Singapore, somehow rebuilt on a hillside in Jimbaran. For someone like me, that's not a nice touch. That's coming home.

Inside the villa

Dark wood, batik, the usual five star vocabulary, sure. But look closer and there are genuine Walter Spies paintings hanging in these villas, the artist who basically taught the West how to look at Bali in the first place. That's not decoration. That's a real, considered piece of the island's own history, just sitting quietly in your room instead of behind museum glass. Even the nightly turndown carries that same care. Beyond the usual dimmed lights and a bath scented with essential oils, the ritual can stretch to a Balinese legend told at bedtime, the kind of story local kids grow up hearing before they can even talk.

And then, somehow, right next to all that thoughtfulness: the pools sit almost entirely exposed, with barely a scrap of shade nearby. On a brutal Jimbaran afternoon, that's not a small miss. It's the one place in the whole design where form clearly beat function, and I still don't understand how nobody caught it.

A private bay of your own

Down at the bottom of the hill, the beach, the main pool, and Loloan Beach Bar & Grill wrap around a cove no outsider can reach. It's genuinely one of a kind. Loloan works just as well for a lazy lunch as it does for something more polished after dark, and every plate, every detail, feels considered. Breakfast opened with Indonesian classics on day one. I got talking with the kitchen, the way I tend to with people I like, and by the end of the stay new, local dishes were showing up unprompted, clearly shaped by conversations we'd had days earlier.

What holds it back from being my personal favourite

For me, this hotel sits about as close to the ceiling as a hotel can get. Still, a few things worth knowing before you book. The property is so sprawling and hilly that walking anywhere real just isn't an option, I tried more than once and gave up every time. You end up tethered to your villa, and the butler occasionally feels more like a chauffeur than anything else because of it. The design is extraordinary, but every so often it tips into being a touch too polished, and something small and warm gets lost in that. And because you're this close to the airport, you can watch planes lifting off and landing across the bay all day, a fun little distraction if that's your thing, it's mine, but it does chip away at the hideaway feeling a bit.

For me, this is close to a perfect hotel, and I get exactly why almost nobody talks about it that way. Strangely, it's still not my personal favourite. Now that I'm the father of two young daughters, a place built entirely around buggies and self-contained villas asks something different of a family than it does of a couple, and my own priorities have shifted right along with that. But I still think about that gardener, out there tending a hillside crawling with mosquitoes he refuses to poison, just so the place stays exactly as it should be. That's this hotel, in miniature. And it's exactly why I'd send almost anyone here without a second thought. If you'd rather see the full range of what we stand behind, have a look at our stays.