Can Bali Become The Ibiza Of South-east Asia?

The Indonesian island is seeing a surge in beach club developments, but can it maintain its momentum to become the Ibiza of South-east Asia?

- Ian Lloyd Neubauer

In the year 2000, a triumvirate of investors from Australia, Indonesia, and the UK opened Ku De Ta, a Mediterranean-style beach club, in Seminyak, then a cluster of rice paddies and hamlets on Bali’s west coast.

“Back in those days, all the action was in Kuta in the south, and whenever someone said let’s go to Ku De Ta, people would say, ‘That’s miles away, you have to go down dirt roads and through rice fields’,” says operations manager Justin Smyth. “But the owners’ vision of a little slice of heaven at the end of the rainbow struck a chord with the Euro-centric crowd who wanted to get away from the craziness of Kuta.”

Fast forward 19 years. Rapid urbanization in Bali has seen the rice fields of Seminyak replaced with a slew of holiday villas, restaurants, boutiques, and hotels. Yet Ku De Ta remains a crowd favorite in Bali, especially at dusk when the island’s famous bloodred sunsets light up the sky in a panoramic fresco of colors.

But Ku De Ta is no longer the only place that tourists in Bali can visit to enjoy upmarket beach food in the comfort of a daybed, or to sip a tropical cocktail at the edge of an oceanfront pool. From Tropicola, a new beach and pool club where everything from the canary yellow parasols to the tutti frutti cocktails hark back to Miami Beach in the ’80s, to Sundara, a Hemingwayesque bar and restaurant with a 57m-long beachfront infinity pool at the Four Seasons Jimbaran Bay, and an upcoming chapter of Ibiza’s famous Cafe Del Mar franchise that will rent out VIP cabanas for $10,000, there are now 31 beach clubs in operation or under construction in Bali – nearly twice as many as two years ago.