Hilton Bali

Here for 5 nights on points as a Diamond. With the 5th night free, the average was around 35,000/ night. A good use of Hilton points, which I find difficult to use due to usual bad value.

We came over from the Intercontinental. I downloaded the Bluebird Taxi app and it worked great. About 110k idr.

check in was pleasant. We had been upgraded on the app about 3 days before to an ocean view king on the 11th floor of the cliff-side tower. This is a real and excellent upgrade. Nice big room. Nice big bathroom. Great view. Especially of the monkeys on our balcony! This building allows easy elevator access down to the pools or up and over to the restaurants. My wife said that she would prefer this room to a suite over in that area.

Breakfast is wonderful. Huge number of options. My wife started eating the Chinese soup each morning. Staff was helpful and nice. Tons of staff available.

The Shore pool-side venue has great pizza and sells beer in handy buckets of 3. Nice place.

The Balinese restaurant “Paon” (?) was very good. For lunch, they do a fun 3 small plates with rice thing. Nice to try all the options.

sadly, this brings us to the lounge. There is still only one, up and back by the suites. It is a great looking building, has great staff, and serves good cocktails from 5 to 7. However, by 5:30 it is overwhelmed. We left after watching people having to stand. Also, the food at happy hour was not much and not great. We only went the first night and have not been back for happy hour. The Shore works better for us. We did return for a couple of mid-day visits for cookies and soft drinks.

A regular that we chatted with said that they are working to re-open the other executive lounge.

The “vibe” here is very good- relaxing and casual and easy. We want to return, especially if/ when the executive lounge situation improves.