Bali-ho!
Indonesia may have received its share of adverse publicity recently, but the tropical island of Bali is fighting hard to shake off negativity. Jenny Webster reports.
Bali is safe, Bali is different. This is the message from Balinese tourism chiefs, who are keen to distance themselves from the general picture of unrest in Indonesia. Differences are largely argued on religious grounds; Balinese people are 95% Hindu, whereas the rest of Indonesia is a mix of religions, creating a steamier cauldron that gives rise to more potential problems.
It is on the message that Bali is safe and different that hotel companies are developing, slowly but surely. One of the largest players is Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. It has two resorts on the island, one on the coast at Jimbaran Bay and the other, more recently opened, Sayan, inland at Ubud.
The company is so confident about the future of Bali's tourism that it is looking for a third property, probably on the east coast of the island.
Neil Jacobs, vice-president of Four Seasons Asia, is a Briton who trained at London's Westminster College and whose career includes the Grosvenor House hotel in London and the Plaza Athenée in Paris. He says: "Bali is resilient, and we can get the rates - up to US$400 (£276.76) a night. We also want to extend the length of time that guests stay on the island. When we opened Sayan we weren't sure that people would stay both there and at Jimbaran. But they now seem to do both, which makes us think that there is a market for a three-centre stay."
In the meantime, the focus is on making a return on the US$6m (£4.15m) invested in Jimbaran Estates, nine apartments attached to the Jimbaran Bay property, which opened at the New Year. With a cool price tag of US$1,500-plus (£1,037) per night, these apartments are aimed at a niche audience: the rich and famous searching for a hideaway. The apartments, the largest of which have four bedrooms, boast private pools and butler service.
Such a collection of properties demands a large workforce: some 1,000 people across the entire operation. In Europe, staffing levels of this kind would inevitably lead to problems. In Bali problems are rare.
Staff are the responsibility of Chris Norton, general manager of Four Seasons Resorts Bali, who is often called "father" by his employees because he is the supplier of work. "The belief in karma - the idea that actions in this life affect how you will come back in the next - make for few problems," says Norton.
Remuneration is also good. A 10% service charge is distributed to all staff on a monthly basis, irrespective of length of service. This means that a waiter might make the equivalent of US$360 a month (£249.10), including the service charge - more than a doctor earns locally. Staff turnover is less than 1%, and it really is a case of jobs for life.
But getting business is still tough, particularly since the attacks of 11 September. In a bid to differentiate itself from its competitors (Hyatt, Ritz-Carlton and the luxury Nusa Dua are also represented on the island), Four Seasons has opened a cookery school attached to Jimbaran Bay. Executive chef Marc Miron, a French-Canadian whose background includes the Westin hotel group, Four Seasons properties in Montreal, and Nevis in the West Indies, heads the school.
Guests can choose from four basic modules: Balinese cuisine; Balinese entertaining; spa cuisine (health-conscious fare); and Asian cuisine. The state-of-the-art school, complete with induction hotplates, can take up to 10 students at a time, paying US$90 (£62.27) per person, plus tax and service charge (21%). Norton reckons that if the school takes US$400 (£276.78) a day then it will soon go into profit.
The school has its own herb and spice garden, growing Asian herbs such as the kemangi leaf, sweet basil, lemon grass, ginger and kaffir lime.
Living and working in Bali
For the non-Balinese, living and working in Bali certainly has its appeal. Chris Norton, an American brought up in Switzerland, opened the Four Seasons hotel in Berlin and was then asked by president of worldwide hotel operations Wolf Hengst to go to Bali to open the Sayan property. Norton flew to Bali for three days, looked at schools for his children and decided almost instantly that he was staying. "That was five years ago and I haven't looked back," he says. "I have always worked in cities, and my biggest fear about coming here was that I would go crazy. But Bali is so intriguing and magical that there's no danger of that."
Colin Clark, a Scot who trained at Napier University in Edinburgh and whose UK experience includes Gleneagles in Auchterarder and the Caledonian in Edinburgh, has been in Bali for four years. After finishing his studies he headed for Disney's Epcot Center in Florida, followed by ski work in Aspen, Colorado, before going to the Regent in Hong Kong, later taken over by Four Seasons. He was then transferred to Singapore, which he describes as "Asia for beginners", before heading to Bali to be resort manager at Jimbaran Bay four years ago.
"Visiting somewhere and living there are two very different things," says Clark. "You have to weigh everything up. But it's easy to live in Bali. People are calm and very genuine. I do miss liquorice allsorts, though.
"Norton and Clark may be relatively long-servers. But newcomer Daniel Simon, director of food and beverage for the Four Seasons properties, arrived in Bali only last October. Simon, a Swede by birth, had decided that he would give his stint in Bali 18 months to see how it worked out, but on his second day changed that to four years. "It's just so beautiful here. I can't imagine being anywhere else at the moment," he says.
On the downside, Simon reports that while the cost of living is cheap, housing is relatively expensive. A two- or three-bedroom house can cost US$1,000 a month (£691.98), although the cost is generally included in the salary package. Culture, too, is lacking - there are few cinemas or theatres.
Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Bali
Web site:www.fourseasons.com
Resort properties: Jimbaran Bay, Denpasar - 147 suites and villas; Sayan, Ubud - 68 suites and villas
Average length of stay: Jimbaran Bay - four nights; Sayan - 2.8 nights
Staff across the properties: 1,000
Business breakdown across two properties: USA 30%; Japan 30%; Europe 20%; other 20%
Average rack rates: one-bedroom villa at Jimbaran Bay or Sayan, US$550 (£380.59); two-bedroom villa, US$1,300 (£899.59)
Occupancy 2001 across two properties: 81%
Turnover across both properties: US$30m-plus (£20.75m-plus)
Jimbaran Estates: nine apartments attached to Jimbaran Bay Rack rate: US$1,500 (£1,037) to US$3,500 (£2,421) per night
Bali: 2,136sq miles. Bali is one of the smaller islands of the thousands that make up the Indonesian archipelago. It is located eight degrees south of the equator. Bali receives two million foreign visitors per year and has 26,000 star-rated hotel rooms. Some 600,000 people are employed in tourism and two million people belong to families that have a breadwinner involved in tourism.
