Introduction
I have never seen a Conrad resort go this cheap, and that made me a little skeptical. Conrad is Hilton's top-end brand, and when a hotel group sells the fanciest name for mid-range money there is usually a reason, normally an old resort left to sag while the logo does the selling. This one opened in 2004, so I arrived squarely expecting the same story.
What I found was a big, well-kept resort with modern rooms and a breakfast buffet that beat most I've eaten on this island. Lunch and dinner were the weak spot, and the beach has a seaweed problem. But is the cheap Conrad a real Conrad? Yes. The rest is small print.
Booking Conrad Bali
As a Hilton for Luxury travel agency, MT Luxury Travel secures exclusive benefits for our clients at Hilton properties worldwide, at no additional cost:
Complimentary daily breakfast for two guests
Room upgrade upon arrival, subject to availability
$100 USD property credit per stay
Early check-in and late checkout priority when available
Welcome amenity and VIP recognition
Double Hilton Honors points: you earn 20x per $ spent
Booking is simple: send us a quick message with the hotel, your dates, room type and number of guests, and we'll take care of the rest.
Location
The website says Nusa Dua but this actually sits roughly 2km up north. There's a couple of warungs behind the resort so you're not 100% reliant on resort foods - but there aren't plenty of options either. The resort knows this - so they run a free shuttle to Bali Collection mall that its in-house guests can use for free.
The airport is 15 to 20 minutes away, which is the best argument for this corner of the island. You land, you blink, you're holding a welcome drink. The resort faces east, so the sea gives you sunrises rather than sunsets, and being a late night person of course I didn't catch any of it.
First Impressions
From the reception pavilion, raised up above the main road, you can see at a glance what you've booked: a classic big resort, 360 rooms along 350 metres of beach, built for people who want a pool and a cocktail and don't need a design concept explained to them.
You check in sitting down, a habit every resort this size should pick up tomorrow, with a glass of jamu, the turmeric and ginger tonic that makes you feel healthy. The same pavilion holds a terrace over the main pools and a lounge called East for afternoon tea and evening cocktails.
Then comes the walk. The resort splits into two main areas: one is the middle around the main pools and one set further back with the suites. My Conrad Suite takes about ~8 minute walk from reception by my estimate. A row of independently run shops lines the route but they seems to have been all closed. The corridors and planting between the blocks are lush and spotless, and for a place that opened in 2004 they look a lot younger.
Conrad Suite Room
I tried a few room types to get the measure of the place, and the one worth describing is the Conrad Suite, because it's one of the best value suites in Nusa Dua. With the special offer, I paid ~200 USD per night, with breakfast included.
They have 110sqm meters of space, bedroom with a door that shuts, a separate living room, a dining table and a balcony over the suites pool. The living room is the part families would love. You can eat, read or take a call without perching on the end of the bed, and with children in tow it's the difference between a relaxing evening and a hostage negotiation.
The bathroom has two sinks, a deep bath, a separate shower and a walk-in wardrobe that swallows the suitcases whole. The water pressure is strong and the hot water is instant. The hotel's stuffed monkey lives here too, dressed in Balinese clothes and holding a corkscrew.
The bed is very firm. I asked for a mattress topper, which turned out to be the hotel equivalent of putting a tea towel on a church pew. The pillows are good and there are plenty of them. I slept fine but not deeply.
Now as you probably have noticed from the pictures - the suites aren't brand new. They are excluded from the most recent renovation and I'm not sure why. But the age is probably why it was so cheap. Taken together, it's a big, comfortable, practical and value suite running about one refurbishment behind the rest of the resorts.
For those who prefer modern over space - all their standard rooms are renovated and feels very new. Pics below. One small note the room does NOT comes with a sofa bed for your kids, so if your kids are old enough to need to own sleeping space, a rollaway bed is available for ~60 AUD / night.
Dining
Breakfast is at Suku, which is also the all-day restaurant, and it was the best eating I did here by a mile. The buffet is as thorough as any I've found in a Bali resort and none of it was filler. Even the staples you'd walk straight past, the fried rice, the chicken sausage, the miso soup, were done properly. Bookings with Hilton for Luxury get free breakfast for 2 adults and 2 kids under 12 - making the stay unbeatable value..
Lunch and dinner were where the stay sagged, which is annoying, because the menus read beautifully. At Azure by the pool I ordered the Balinese spiced chicken wrap and waited for the Balinese spice. It tasted like a chicken wrap. Any chicken wrap. The one you ate at an airport gate in 2014. It was also small for the price. Dinner was at Eight Degrees South, named for the resort's latitude, which is more thought than went into the seasoning. It's a huge, spread-out place with indoor, outdoor and lounge seating plus private dining, and the seafood menu was the most exciting thing I read all week. The bread came with sambal and a prawn butter so good I'd have eaten it off a paperback. Then baby squid stuffed with bamboo shoot, with black garlic, pumpkin and bulung, the local seaweed: four loud ingredients that together said nothing at all. Overall, it wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great either.
The Beach and the Pools
The resort has pools with sand on the bottom, a short walk from a real beach. That tells you a lot about the real beach.
At the southern end, in front of the reception area, the water is shallow and the sand collects seaweed. That part isn't the hotel's fault, and every morning a crew of staff deals with it by scooping it into holes in the sand and covering it over. Watching a beach's worth of seaweed get quietly interred has the feel of a very well-run cover-up.
Further north, the beach gets properly nice, with loungers and a waiter on hand. And hawkers. Bali's beaches are all public, so the hotel can't keep them off, and this was the thickest crowd of them I've met anywhere. The first offers you a tour. No thanks. The second offers you a tour. No thanks. By the fifth you've started explaining your plans for the afternoon, which is a mistake, because now the sixth knows you're free on Thursday.
In my whole stay I did not see one guest on one beach lounger. Not one. Everybody else probably saw the same issues I had and went to the pool. The Conrad has a lovely beach, and its guests use it as a view.
The pools are good, which is lucky. The central one is 33 metres long with a lagoon either side linking the ground floor rooms, and beyond those are the sandy-bottomed pools. I've never understood sandy pools. After an hour on the real beach, I understood the appeal.
The Chapel, the Spa and the Rest
There's a beautiful wedding chapel in front of the suites area, on the sunrise side of the island. The sun comes up in front of it.
The spa's front desk looked half-furnished and gave me no reason to book anything. The tennis courts are free for guests, there's bike rental, and there's a decent-sized gym at the back. No notes on those.
Kids Club
There is a kids club, behind the sandy pools, and the resort clearly wants children, with activities and separate kids menus in the restaurants. I saw very few children during my stay, so I never saw the club busy. The best thing about the kids club is it's completely free for in-house guests, which I think is the only resort in Nusa Dua that does that. Not like you want to the kids away for the whole day right (or do you?)
Service
Service runs on a script, and now and then you can hear it, the same phrases in the same order. At a small boutique place that would bother me. At 360 rooms I think it's the right call, because the script gets things done: there was service at every pool and every beach area, including, heroically, the loungers nobody used.
The script also works when something goes wrong. When I checked in, I found bugs in the room (it's Bali, and the bugs were here first). Within ten minutes there were people at the door clearing it out, and I was moved to a new room. Overall the service was good, and about as personal as a resort this size can get.
The Verdict
Overall: 7.5/10
Is it a great resort? Nearly. The rooms are fresh apart from a bathroom light that needs a firm word, the grounds are kept far better than a 2004 opening suggests, breakfast is excellent and the facilities are mostly very good. It's also unusually cheap for a Conrad, which covers a lot of sins.
Book it for a family holiday where the pools do the heavy lifting and breakfast is the meal that matters. Skip it if your Bali plan is long days on the sand with nobody selling you anything, or long dinners at the hotel.
Book is an ocean view room in the main blocks if you're travelling as couple, or a suite if you're a family. Would I come back? For this money, yes.
Booking Conrad Bali
As a Hilton for Luxury travel agency, MT Luxury Travel secures exclusive benefits for our clients at Hilton properties worldwide, at no additional cost:
Complimentary daily breakfast for two guests
Room upgrade upon arrival, subject to availability
$100 USD property credit per stay
Early check-in and late checkout priority when available
Welcome amenity and VIP recognition
Double Hilton Honors points: you earn 20x per $ spent
Booking is simple: send us a quick message with the hotel, your dates, room type and number of guests, and we'll take care of the rest.
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