One of the World’s Great Hotels

“It is rare to find a hotel where service is flawless in every detail: The Tugu Malang, one of the world’s few truly great hotels, is such a place: The hotel is of such astonishing beauty and the staff are such nice hard-working people, anxious to please in every way, that the Tugu is in fact a destination in itself. If you have no other reason to stop in Malang, then do so to enjoy the extraordinary pleasures of the Tugu.

The rooms are ravishing, each one with some element of art and designed thoughtfully for maximum comfort. Exotic fruits await you; the bed is turned down with a friendly note before you go to sleep. Want your shoes cleaned? They come back polished better than when they were new.

Breakfast includes almost unlimited pleasures: the menu is vast and you can combine local and Western dishes. Everything is both artful and delicious and the restaurant setting is a work of art in itself. Afternoon tea is included, with an array of local delicacies, served with the ever-present Tugu charm.

The hotel owner has built a world-class museum into the hotel. Seemingly endless antiques and art are fabulously displayed; and the best part is that the hotel supplies a brilliant and knowledgeable tour guide to take you round. My guide was Wahyu, who clearly loves the hotel and told me he takes considerable amounts of time to research the objects on display so as to give the best presentation. His tour was completely involving because of his intelligence and enthusiasm — it felt like being a celebrity receiving a highly-privileged personal presentation from the head curator of a national museum! I do hope that management will recognize Wahyu’s excellence and ensure his career development in both museum curating and management!

Reception also has the best people: kind, knowledgeable, helpful. They can get you wherever you want in town and make any needed arrangements for you. If you’d like to visit Bromo I’d highly recommend taking the cross-desert route from Malang: it is highly scenic and also quite surreal in places. I did the trip the other way round by ojek (motorbike taxi), but you can also do it by jeep and the Tugu can make arrangements. The ability to take this mindbending route is reason enough to stay in Malang. But you don’t even need that reason. The rare graciousness, fragrant beauty, opulence, detailed service and pure delight that exemplifies everything the Tugu stands for means that you should head for the Tugu if you are anywhere in the region for no other reason than to stay in one of the most fabulous five-star hotels in the world at a price for which you would get something only very ordinary in the USA or Europe.

This is a best of the best, a treasure, a complete delight: don’t miss the opportunity to stay there!”