Renovated hotel on Kuta / Legian Beach at bargain prices – Wyndham Garden Kuta Beach

The Wyndham Garden Kuta Beach has a great oceanfront location near the Boardwalk Mall in the Kuta/Legian area of Bali and offers stylish, newly renovated rooms and full service amenities at a great-value price. After my hotel inspection I’m sure to stay here on a future Bali trip and recommend you give it a try!

Location: The Wyndham Garden Kuta Beach is facing the beautiful beach at the Northern End of Kuta, close to Legian and next to the Boardwalk mall, making the location a big plus for the Wyndham Garden Kuta. You are steps from the beach and have lots of restaurants, bars and shopping in easy walking distance. I consider this area better than the older, Southern part of Kuta. It’s a 30 min taxi ride from the airport.

Service: The front desk staff offered a friendly welcome to the hotel, but that’s when the problems started. The hotel had not received proper reservation information and had not processed my prepayment, resulting in confusion. It took a while to resolve the issue to get me into my room.
Once I checked my (upgraded) room, I noticed that the safe was locked. The front desk dispatched an engineer quickly to open the safe. After he left, I noticed that the safe wasn’t bolted down, but I gave up as I was there only one night.
Housekeeping had done a good job cleaning the room and providing towels and toiletries as appropriate, but failed to report a number of maintenance issues. 
Restaurant staff was very friendly when I checked out the breakfast buffet, was quick to clean up tables and restock the buffet or deliver make-to-order items. The coffee shop staff was just as friendly and professional, making the restaurant the best-served department of the hotel.

While I found the staff to be friendly and helpful, they were hapless in addressing the issues, pointing to a management issue. Clearly, the management lacks attention to detail and is either unwilling or unable to deliver a 4-star experience at the Wyndham Garden Kuta. 

Room: I had booked a Deluxe King Room and was upgraded on both of my stays to a Deluxe Pool Access Room. The room has the same size and amenities, but is on the ground level facing the back pool with direct access through the patio door. There is a small patio outside, but no chairs and no way to walk around the pool to the loungers. This is great for families, but not for anybody looking for peace & quiet. The same is somewhat true for the Pool View Rooms on the higher level, so not everybody will want to pay for these “upgrades”.

Wyndham Garden Kuta pool access room

The Wyndham Garden  Kuta was recently renovated and I like the modern decor. The rooms have grey’ish hardwood floors and furniture, with walls and accent pillows in pastel colors. It looks very contemporary and could have been straight out of a magazine – or a more expensive Westin hotel for that matter. The painted wall behind the bed and patterned pillows blended well with the local touches from the lamps.
The king-size bed has nice sheets, pillows and comforter and you have universal power outlets next to the bed. The room also has a padded chair in the corner. 

Wyndham Garden Kuta Deluxe King Room

Across from the bed are a desk with chair, a luggage bench, a flat-screen TV, as well as a mini-fridge and tea & coffee facilities.

Wyndham Garden Kuta Deluxe King Room

There is a small wardrobe near the entrance, with a small safe. Unfortunately, one of the rooms didn’t have a safe at all and in the other room the safe wasn’t bolted down, somewhat defeating its purpose!

Wyndham Garden Kuta Safe to go

The bathroom is equally modern, with a large sink on counter-top in the center with lots of space for your toiletries. The toilet is off to one side, set against a colorful wall and the full tiled shower is on the other with a partial glass wall.

One of the bathrooms had a terrible sewer smell, which according to online reviews effects several of the rooms and is usually due to poor plumbing. You’d have to ask to change rooms if it is too bad, but I was there only for one night each and kept the sliding bathroom door closed.
Oddly, the Wyndham Garden Kuta only offers two large towels and a foot mat, but no hand towels or wash clothes. The towels and standard Wyndham toiletries are of good quality. 

The free WiFi internet in the Deluxe Rooms is very poor. While I measured speeds of up to 2Mbps, it was unreliable, would disconnect frequently and slow down in the evening and mornings, making it completely useless. I wasn’t even able to browse the most simple web sites or read email, forcing me to either go to the lobby or use my mobile phone service. There is no excuse for a hotel of this category to have no working internet in 2018!

The rooms have little sound insulation, so noise from the hallways and the pool is noticeable in the room, so your stay experience will depend on the courtesy of your neighbors. I had one stay with few problems and one very noisy stay, so your mileage may vary!

During my site inspection I had a chance to see one of the Executive Junior SuitesNear the entrance is a sitting area with a couch, chair and table facing a partial wall with a TV. The wall provides some nice separation from the large bed. The TV can be turned around, allowing watching from the sofa or bed. Two large windows provided plenty of light (so much so that my photos were washed out – sorry).

While I really enjoyed the decor of the room and the furniture and features deserve the 4-star rating of the hotel, the property lacks attention to detail and showed many small issues that marred the experience and are not acceptable in this category of hotel: The towel rack was almost falling down, the patio had plenty of loose or lost tiles, the safe wasn’t bolted down or had gone missing altogether and the internet was not working. Despite reporting all of these issues after my first stay, none of them had been fixed on the second stay in the same room!

Restaurant & Amenities: The Wyndham Garden offers a bar, cafe and restaurant on site with all-day service and 24h room service. Breakfast is served buffet style, offering coffee, tea or juice, bread and pastries, fresh fruit, salads and cold cuts as well as large selection of hot Western and local dishes. You can also have egg dishes made to order! The quality of the breakfast items is ok and comparable to cheaper hotels in the area. It is reasonably priced at $7pP. 

There is also a small coffee shop on property with indoor and outdoor seating. It offers much better espresso coffee drinks and better pastries – if you just want a good coffee and croissant to start your day, this is a better choice!

The Wyndham Garden Kuta Beach has two pools. One pool is in the back building, with the ground floor rooms  having direct access to it. There is one shallow kiddie pool and a deeper adult pool, as well as a few loungers. The pool-access rooms and the pool work great for families, as you can watch the little ones from your room and it’s a safe and closed off area. Unfortunately, one side faces the huge construction area, so it’s not necessarily a relaxing spot when the jack hammers are at work!

Wyndham Garden Kuta back pool

The sunset pool is located upstairs, facing the beach and of course sunset. It’s small, but nicely done and has some loungers around it. You’ll have to get up early to score a seat here, but it’s a nice spot to watch the sunset or to take a dip after a day on the beach!
There is even a spa and salon for some extra pampering on site, but I didn’t try it during my stay.

Not necessarily an “amenity” but worth noting is the construction project onsite. The hotel is building a new wing between the main building and the back building with construction work going on Monday – Saturday from 9:00am – 9:00pm until 2019. The noise varies depending on the work currently conducted, so it can be a reasonably quiet day or a day full off jack-hammering. All of the rooms and the back pool area are exposed to it, so you will encounter disruption on a longer stay, but might get lucky on a one-night stay. 

Value & Rewards: At a rate of $63/night, the Wyndham Garden Kuta Beach offers very modern rooms in a beach front location. That’s less than other hotels in this category with a comparable location and I’d consider it good value. The value is reduced though by the issues I encountered, so you have to be quite forgiving to enjoy your stay. You can check current prices here!
The Wyndham Garden Kuta apparently is not integrated into the Wyndham Rewards system yet. They didn’t receive my Rewards number despite having made the reservation through the Wyndham website, they did not offer any elite benefits and did not post the rewards points despite reminding them, resulting in me having to follow up with Wyndham Rewards, an unpleasant chore. Also keep in mind that the hotel is not maintaining their prices properly, so don’t book directly on  the Wyndhams website, without checking a meta-search site first – during my booking the price at wyndham.com was up to double of the lowest provider!
At a rewards rate of 15,000 points/night, the Wyndham Garden Kuta is a poor choice to redeem rewards, but it can be lucrative to stay here during promotions. The frequent promotions to earn 15,000 points after two stays can be achieved at low cost here!

Bottomline: After my site inspection last year, I really wanted to like the Wyndham Garden Kuta Beach, despite its middling online reviews, for it’s very nice rooms, great location on the beach and full service amenities at a low price. But my two stays were marred by a long list of issues, from the noisy construction project, to poor internet, poor maintenance and a service team that was friendly but hapless in dealing with the issues. Now, I understand the poor ratings of the Wyndham Garden Kuta. If you like the room decor and want a beachfront location, the Wyndham Garden Kuta is good value. But you might have to deal with a laundry list of issues during your stay that will test your patience!

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