Bali holiday properties one-up each other with immense pools, cliffside rooms to woo bookings in travel-site age
- Tourism recovery and a legal shift that better incentivises owners to invest in their properties have sparked an upgrade frenzy
- With 10,000 vacation rentals to compete with, owners need new and visually arresting features to land on tourists’ shortlists
Voluminous rooftop pools and dramatic cliffside terraces are among the ambitious and social media-ready features that resorts in Bali are using to lure guests and investors amid a tourism recovery in the Indonesian vacation destination.
“Bali is rebounding from two years of Covid-19 pandemic and we’ve been seeing two impressive trends from the rental perspective,” said Jing Cho Yang, founder and CEO of Bukit Vista, which manages vacation properties in Bali and Yogyakarta.
The first is the pre-eminence of travel-booking sites, and the second is a legal shift that better incentivises owners to invest in their properties, he said. Add in eagerness to capitalise on the post-pandemic travel boom, plus the fact that Bali has an estimated 10,000 holiday rental properties competing to land on tourists’ shortlists, and it’s no surprise that properties are vying to outdo each other.
“Unique designs are rewarded more than commodity type looks,” Yang said. “This is a function of search engines like Airbnb and Booking.com rewarding more visually striking designs,” he said.
