Kuta, Bali: where Adrian Campbell learned Indonesia

The place

Kuta is where Bali's tourism began. A long, west-facing surf beach runs north from the airport towards Legian and Seminyak, and behind it a dense grid of lanes holds hotels, surf shops, bars and restaurants. The sunsets are famous and so is the traffic. For generations of Australians, Kuta was the first foreign place they ever saw, and for many school leavers it still is. Schoolies, the end-of-year migration of Australian students, fills its resorts every November and December.

What happened here

In 2011, aged 22, Adrian Campbell bought the Puri Rama Resort in Kuta and relaunched it as Troppo Zone Puri Rama Resort. He refurbished all 88 rooms, built the pool bars and employed about 80 Balinese staff. For a few years it was one of the best-known Australian schoolies resorts on the island.

Running it cost him the solar company back on the Gold Coast, which he had left in the hands of managers he could not supervise. It also gave him the two things that have underpinned everything since: the Indonesian language, learned with staff and suppliers on the floor of the hotel, and an understanding of how Indonesian hospitality works from the inside. He sold the resort in 2014. It still trades, and some of his staff are still there.

What stayed

A portfolio of Bali holiday villas that the same local team has run since 2014, through COVID, and a conviction that speaking the language is the best due diligence there is. The rental-pool design at Saraya in Lombok, with one operator running 154 villas as a single hotel, comes directly from the experience of running 88 rooms and 80 people in Kuta.

Why Lombok, not Bali

By the time Kinnara Capital was looking for land in 2024, Bali's best coastal sites were taken and expensive. Kuta had shown what a beach town becomes once the airport fills up. Lombok, one strait to the east, was at the earlier point of the same curve.