Nirwana Resort Hotel

Guests praise the exceptional service, spacious and clean rooms, and varied breakfast options. However, some suggest improving the breakfast buffet.

This could be a 5* thing, for now it feels more like 4 to 4.5 * for me. Let me explain. First of all, there are many really big upsides for the Nirwana Resort: - The hotel is in a wonderful location. The beach directly in front of the hotel is beautiful, however if you explore a little further, the beach right next (connected to some rentable mini-houses) is also part of the Nirwana area and even cleaner and more inviting for a direct swim. - The room was even nicer than anticipated via the photos. Everything was tastefully designed, clean and room-service did a great job daily. The hotel itself is abut 35 years old, very close to the sea and constantly exposed to salty winds. It's just amazing that they managed to maintain the open-corridors in such a great condition. There's a lot of wooden features (which look really good imho). - The staff is friendly and helpful. You will find plenty of activities if that is your thing. Now to the kinda neutral part: Some of the in-hotel facilities were not available during our stay. For example to get to the gym you had to switch to another building a few hundret meters away. You still get everything you need, so it's not really a complaint - more a thing of convenience but since all the surrounding area is pretty nice I would recommend exploring a bit anyway. The two main negative factors were: - It's a very secluded resort and there is no normal supermarket or anything similar nearby for basic daily needs like water or what-have-you. This means you will need to pay mega-premiums. 1 L of water costs over 100k Rupias or about 7 to 8 USD. A small bottle of coke is about $3.5. Same goes for all other snacks, drinks and foods. They are very overpriced, just because you don't have a choice. Another example: A pizza + a "gourmet" burger were close to $50. I wouldn't even complain if it was really "gourmet". However not even close: You can eat both, it's not terrible but it's very basic, the pizza too dry and kinda small, the burger the most boring I had in years and not great beef at all. Same goes for all the other food we had in the in-house restaurant. It's not bad but every dish feels like something is a bit off or missing or just very basic. Especially for the premium price you pay this seems not right. There are two more restaurants within ~1km walking distance: An indian restaurant. Pricing is on the higher side but more reasonable than the indoor restaurant. Tandoori chicken was over-spiced (not hot just too strong taste with nothing to compliment it) and very dry/boring. The infamous butter chicken was great, though. I would recommend the "Spicy restaurant" (4 stars) but make sure you get something with sauce. And then there is a seafood restaurant. It's really pricy (especially when compared to seafood in Batam for example) but you get an incredible fresh and well seasoned fish/crab/prawn selection that makes it worth 100% to visit. Also the view is fantastic. I actually would rate this whole experience 5 stars - if you would get the basics (water, coke, some smaller snacks) for a fair price; right now this part feels a bit like a rip-off. Also, local taxi service is a bit over-priced, same goes for activities. I really don't mind spending more, but there needs to be a balance where you don't feel taken advantage of. If you don't care about that, I would fully recommend the stay at Nirwana Hotel.