Bali Shangrila Beach Club

Tired hotel and even worse service

My wife and I stayed here for two nights and I would strongly motivate anyone reading this to avoid the same mistake.

The hotel facilities are run-down, the rooms are pokey, and there is zero privacy. On the plus side, it does have a great view of the sea and its own small beach.

The small restaurant serves very average and expensive lunch. The breakfast is good. We didn’t have dinner here during our stay.

The staff – though mostly friendly – are ultimately pretty unhelpful if you are trying to achieve/arrange anything, and maddeningly self-satisfied should you need help with a particular problem.

Whilst we were in Candi Dasa my wife, unfortunately, had her phone stolen (by a member of staff at the local Perama bus office – but that’s a different story). Whilst obviously our hotel were in no way responsible for this I was truly shocked by their complacent attitude and unwillingness to take this incident seriously – or to assist us.

The hotel’s manager even asked us not to call the police as he didn’t want any officers near the hotel as it would ‘spoil the atmosphere’ and make waves for him. Not a good start.

Eventually, we were shuttled to the police station to file a report etc which was useful.

On day 2 we tried to book our onward travel to Lombok through the hotel and were quoted laughable (and I do mean laughable) rates, so booked the journey elsewhere ourselves. Due to a system error with this alternative agent, our booking email did not arrive even though payment had already been made. When we tried and failed to rectify this situation ourselves and were ignored by the travel agency (partly as a result of the language barrier), we asked our hotel to help us and – again – their attitude was absolutely appalling. The manager seemed to think the whole situation was funny and failed to help us.

Eventually, we sorted the matter out ourselves without further assistance from the hotel and were charged a total of 80,000 rp for the privilege of using their landline to do this.

By far the worst attitude to customers I have experienced in 3 months of travelling. All the more grating given the rates you pay for the hotel in the first place.

It has a nice view of the water but that is true of plenty of alternatives locally. I would encourage anyone reading this to stay elsewhere.