Review: IZE Hotel Bali ~ Few vs Many Few vs Many

Review: IZE Hotel Bali

After 6 wonderful nights at 3 wonderful villa resorts it’s time to move on. This time we visit IZE Hotel Bali, a hotel in the heart of the island: Seminyak. It’s located in the middle of the busiest street. Hopefully this turns out for the better because we can’t help but being a bit sceptic.

We’re heading for the one (and only) design hotel of Bali: IZE Hotel. The owner of the hotel is the same as The Balé in Nusa Dua, so the people that take us there basically work for the same owner.

This time we don’t have to wait during check in. Everything goes nice and smoothly. This means we can go out and get a decent first impression of the hotel. Usually we get a hotel tour so we receive a bit of information about the property. This is one of the first times that doesn’t happen. We can understand because the hotel isn’t really big and we should be able to take care of ourselves.

Our room consists of a bed (which is by the way awesome, one of the best we’ve had ever) and a bathroom. There’s a tv but we doubt it that many people actually use this. The design of the rooms (and the hotel itself) is very light which is comfortable (typical Bali style is a bit darker so this a nice change). But that’s about it.

We go out of the room to see what the hotel has to offer. There’s supposed to be an awesome pool on the top of the hotel. We check it out and it does look awesome. Too bad it’s build on the wrong side of the hotel. We don’t really know if this is a mistake, or that maybe the other way around simply wasn’t possible but the view on the other side of the hotel (busy street) would be more interesting to look over, than what you see right now.

Downstairs there’s a gym which nobody uses. We even doubt it’s open because we weren’t able to get in. We even walked across it multiple times but not once we saw someone pumping iron.

The restaurant in front of the hotel is the biggest delight. The breakfast is awesome. Everything is fresh and they created this cool coffee house atmosphere. It’s really spectacular and the people that work there are super friendly. When we stayed at IZE, during the weekends there was this Indonesian band that played famous covers at night. Boring and stereotypical you might think, but these two guys (especially the guitar dude) were pretty freakin’ good.

The IZE Hotel in Seminyak is fun to stay at. If you don’t fancy a private villa (?) or you just don’t want to spend that much this is good and fun alternative. Beware however of the crowded area it’s located in. We wouldn’t recommend staying here more than 3 nights. The busy streets and it’s smog will get to you. Also the rooms and hallway are a bit loud. You could wake up hearing people talk in the hallway in the middle of the night.