Karma Beach — Restaurant in Kuta Selatan

A very beautiful beach unfortunately end up with a bad experience 🙁 Come here during a peak season.

Here's my bad experience and the lesson learned (outside visitors please beware 😬 ) The problem was the lift. It has 4 person capacity. And it takes around 4 minutes for a round trip. So you will wait minimum 4 minutes if there is nobody in the queue. Going down not a big problem. Waiting time vary around 5-30 mins, depends on the queue. The problem come when after the sunset you want to go up by the lift the queue is insane and chaos. Staying guest will get blue queuing card with number, the outside visitor will get white card with number. The rules for queued always prioritized staying guest (blue card) than a visitor (white card). Also priority for elder and kids, pregnant woman It seems ok for me at first. The problem is how they interpreted and implement the priority : A. When there is 30 blue card, and 25 white card, even the white card already queued at number 1-20, but if there's blue card at number 21 at the queue, it will be prioritized to get directly to the lift. B. Regardless of the queue position, the blue card always prioritized until all the blue card was none, than the white card queue could be processed and using the lift according to the number given. C. If you are outside visitor, even elder or with kids, your not allowed to go up using lift until there is no blue card on the queue 🙁 D. If there 40 person on the queued, we can imagine how long it will take to go up. 4 person / lift x round trip time 4 mins.

Sadly for my first visit as an outside visitor, I get a 'lower class' of service for the lift service (even you pay around 500k for a visit there). During the high season and peak time to go up by lift it was almost chaos.

Here's my two cents : If you are outside visitor (not a staying guest) please prepare mentally to get unpleasant discriminative service. For using lift, go down to beach during low queue (2-3 pm) and go up before sunset or around 5 pm if you don't want to get stuck in very long queue time. Avoid holiday season or high season for convenience.

Hopefully in the future outside guest will get more fair treatment. As always domestic guest is also treated lower than international guest. (Padahal satu negara, satu bangsa, dan di jaman pandemi, yang banyak datang kan turis lokal yang bantu wisata ke Bali juga, kenapa bangsa sendiri kurang dianggap 😏, semoga pandemi ini membuat kita lebih saling menolong dan menghargai. Ada yg tidak membedakan tapi ada yang membedakan).

Anyway it is a...

Underwhelming experience… left after an hour because nobody took my order, and the music was pretty bad (listen to the videos… with power drilling in the background too, during peak hours on a Friday). In terms of vibes, this is definitely a more family-oriented place; felt like a Disney cruise or a kids’ water park with $15 cocktails. Good for families, but if you want a more chill/mature and relaxing vibe, I recommend going elsewhere.

I came by after a great treatment up at Karma Spa at 1pm. I’d made a reservation on Chope for Karma Beach at 3pm. The spa treatment went a bit longer than expected, so I messaged the Karma whatsapp account to say I’d be a bit late, and asked if I could move my reservation to 4pm. The team said they’d check, but I didn’t hear back. So I decided to head down to Karma Beach anyways (was told to use the shuttle) and see if my reservation was still available.

There was some confusion with the reception team as they sat me somewhere less than optimal that was for guests without a reservation. I joined the Karma VIP free loyalty program just prior, which also apparently gives you priority access to sunbeds, but still I was directed to sit at one of the less nice options, while about 20 other sunbeds were unoccupied (with “reserved” signs). Not sure what the point of a reservation is then? It was like I hadn’t made one. I was solo so maybe that’s why I was directed to sit at a less nice sunbed.

I wound up leaving after an hour, having spent $0. Interesting because while the VIP loyalty program includes no minimum spend for Karma Beach (so I was under no obligation to buy anything), I understand it’s around 500,000 IDR for a sunbed otherwise. In the entire hour I was there, no staff members came by and asked if I wanted anything.

When I was leaving, I was asked if I was a hotel guest (staff implied that I needed to be one in order to take the shuttle back up to the hotel parking lot). I explained that I was a spa guest and was told to use the shuttle to go down to the beach, and it wound up bring okay. But it felt odd to have no service for an hour, then all the sudden as I was leaving, get grilled on if I was supposed to be using...

Decent beach club, but not luxury at all.

My girlfriend and I came here after spending the day before at Finns VIP so we might not be fair with our review given our great experience at the previous club, but I few things to flag.

The entry cost is IDR 1,500,000 for two people with sunbeds. Where IDR 500k is just for the entry and the remaining to use at the bar. A bit more expensive if we compare it to Finns VIP where the whole total was towards consumption (no entry fee), but ok as they sell it is a more luxurious beach club experience with a private beach. However, what we found is the opposite.

Service was ok. As usual in every place that we went to in Bali, but when you come to this type of beach club where they sell the luxury experience, I would expect more attention towards the customer. We arrived at the front desk that they have at the top of the cliff to buy the tickets and due to some issues with the lift that takes you to the club, there is a bus that takes you down. Once we were driven down, you needed to walk for 3-5 minutes until you reached the first bar at Karma Beach Club. There was nobody there waiting to greet us or lead us towards our sun beds. We had to make our way in until we saw someone working there who took us out to let and took us to the sun beds.

Food was expensive and average. We ordered a pizza prawns and a mezze plate with a bucket of beers. With that order, we were already close to the total consumption that we paid upfront and back to the service, no one asked how our food was or checked if we needed anything else.

Another thing is that they mentioned that it is a private beach. However, if you walk west alongside the beach from Palamilla for around 5-7mins, you can access the beach side where Karma Beach Club is.

Finally, the toilets were not the cleanest… the floor was super wet from people coming from swimming, which is normal on a beach club, but back to our experience at Finns. Every time that somebody would use the toilet, there was someone ready to mop and clean the toilet so it was not constantly...