Is Bali dead? I checked into Canggu’s oldest and newest luxury hotels to find out

Home to matcha bars, padel courts and beach clubs, Canggu is the poster child for Bali s digital nomad transformation, but overtourism has seen some ward visitors away from the area. Anna Moloney checked into Hotel Tugu, the first hotel opened in Canggu, and The Regent, the coastline s new, five-star luxury resort, to see how the area is still changing In Robert Frost’s well known poem The Road Not Taken, it is “the path less traveled” that is upheld as the superior choice for its speaker. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” I can only imagine, then, the contempt with which Mr Frost would regard my decision to holiday in Bali – the road very much well travelled by, especially by well-to-do westerners just like myself. Indeed, the island is now so popular (the annual number of international visitors has climbed 173 per cent in the last decade, clocking in at just under 7m in 2025) that its previous eva