Booking a Bali Villa: The Twelve Questions Worth Asking
Every villa listing in Bali is written by someone whose job is to make the house look good, which is entirely fair and completely unhelpful when you are choosing between two properties that both photograph beautifully. The information that actually predicts your fortnight is almost never in the description. It is, however, freely available — you just have to ask, and most managers answer straight away.
One: how many steps from the road? Gorge-side and clifftop houses are frequently reached by long flights cut into a slope. Charming on arrival, considerably less so with luggage, small children, or anyone whose knees have opinions. Get the number.
Two: is this one building or several? A great many larger properties are two or three small villas sold together behind a shared gate. The bedroom count is the same; the experience is not. Groups who want to sit round one table need to know before they book, not after.
Three: how many does the main table seat? A large group lives in one room, and that room carries breakfast, the wet afternoon and every evening. If it seats eight and you are twelve, someone is on the edge of the group all fortnight.
Four: what is the pool depth at both ends? Infinity edges photograph beautifully and are often uniformly deep with no shallow section or step. With small children this is the single most important measurement in the house.
Five: how is the water supplied? On the Bukit peninsula in particular there is no river and supply is largely tankered. Well-run houses manage it invisibly with proper storage; poorly run ones ration and guests find out in the shower. A vague answer is itself an answer.
Six: what is being built next door? In Canggu and increasingly in Ubud, development is continuous. Check the satellite view as well as asking — it is usually more current than the listing photographs, which may be two or three years old.
Seven: what exactly is included? Housekeeping daily or on request. Breakfast, or breakfast plus a cook for other meals at cost. Pool maintenance, laundry, airport transfer, a driver and for how many hours. These vary enormously between properties at the same price.
Eight: do staff live in? Live-in staff mean someone is on the property at all times, which is convenient and not entirely private. Daily staff mean the house is yours from mid-afternoon. Neither is better; groups simply have a preference and rarely think to state it.
Nine: bathroom-to-bed ratio, and are the bedrooms equivalent? Six bedrooms and three bathrooms is a different holiday from six and six. And in most houses one bedroom is noticeably worse than the others, which is worth knowing before the group has to decide who takes it.
Ten: what can we walk to? A house needing a car for every loaf of bread wears down whoever ends up driving. A shop, a café and somewhere to swim within walking distance keeps everyone independent, which over a fortnight is worth more than a better view.
Eleven: what is the road like after dark? Many of the quietest villas sit on unlit single-track lanes. Fine with a driver, less fine if the plan involved scooters and a few drinks.
Twelve: when were the photographs taken? Ask plainly. Furniture fades, gardens grow, neighbours build, and a manager who tells you the images are three years old is a manager worth dealing with.
A word on how to ask. All twelve of these fit comfortably in one polite message, and sending them together is far more effective than drip-feeding. Managers deal with enquiries all day; a single clear list gets a single clear reply, usually within twenty-four hours. Splitting them across five messages over a week gets progressively shorter answers from someone who has stopped taking you seriously.
Watch for the answers that are technically responsive and actually evasive. “The pool is suitable for families” is not a depth. “A few steps down from the road” is not a number. “The area is developing” is not an answer about the plot next door. None of this necessarily means the house is bad, but it does mean you should ask again and get specifics before you transfer money.
Photographs and satellite imagery do a lot of work for free. Reverse-image search the listing shots to see whether they appear on other properties, which does happen. Check the satellite view for construction, for how close the neighbours are, and for whether the garden in the photographs still exists. Five minutes here regularly reveals more than an hour of reading descriptions.
And take the reply itself as data. A manager who answers twelve questions precisely, volunteers a drawback you did not ask about, and tells you when the photographs were taken is running a house you will probably enjoy. That signal is more reliable than the star rating, the photography or the price, and it costs one message to obtain.
None of this takes long. A single message with six or seven of these questions will usually come back within a day, and the quality of the reply tells you almost as much as the answers do. A manager who responds precisely and without defensiveness runs a good house; one who deflects is telling you something you would otherwise discover on day two.