News
In my last newsletter I promised to let you know what has been keeping me so busy recently (apart from designing the new format of this newsletter, which I hope you like!).
Some of you may remember the announcement I made a while ago explaining that the time had come for me to sell my hotel and conference centre in Bali and move back to the West. Living in Bali for all these years has been wonderful but to develop the next stage of my work I need to be in a western locatation, closer to where all my students live. Bali has turned out to be just too far for people to travel to.
So Dancing Dragon Cottages has been on the market for some time and there has been interest but no buyer. Hmmmm, I thought. What would I recommend to someone else in this situation? Having professionally helped many other people over the years to sell their properties, I know that when a sale doesn't happen it often means the owner isn’t quite ready to let go of the place. Pondering on whether this might be the case with me, I realized that there were still some things I have always wanted to do at the hotel that I had never done. Now, most people would say, “What’s the point in spending more money on a place when you know you want to sell?” but I’ve seen people stagnate in situations for years because of this attitude. So, walking my talk and taking the advice I have given to others, I moved to live full time at the hotel with my husband, Richard, and we began.
In the last few months we have redecorated all the guest rooms, gutted and rebuilt the entire back of house area, beautified the gardens and pool area, installed a new eco-friendly wastewater system, put in international direct dial telephones and set up an internet café.
We've also made many improvements to the hotel restaurant. Richard used to work as a top chef in international 5-star hotels so one of his first actions when taking over as hotel manager was to buy a top quality coffee-making machine and put Illy coffee and hot chocolate on the menu. I don’t drink coffee myself (I’ve never liked it) but I’m told that coffee-lovers rate Illy as world class, and the hot chocolate he has found is also in a league of its own.
Next he added organic fruit, vegetables and salads, which are hard to find in Bali, especially in our remote corner of the island. Then he added home baked bread, which is equally hard to find. We never microwave food or add MSG as most restaurants in Bali do, so he worked with the staff to teach them flavourful recipes that could be freshly prepared on request. And so the changes went on, and over the last few months we have seen the restaurant sales double and the hotel occupancy soar. Interestingly we did absolutely zero advertising apart from the basic information that has always been on the hotel website. The news went out entirely by word of mouth, and as I've seen with my books sales over the years, this is the most powerful form of recommendation there is.
I should mention that neither Richard nor myself take a salary from the hotel. We have chosen instead to reinvest all the profits in improvements. Built from the royalties from my books and the income generated by teaching workshops, the whole venture has been a 7-year labour of love which we hope, when sold, will give us enough capital to make a start on creating a permanent place in the West to run all our courses.
Having made all these changes, I now feel very ready to sell so in the New Year I will be having the property revalued and turning my attention more fully to this. If you have ever dreamed of owning a hotel in Bali or know someone who seriously would like to, click here!
www.spaceclearing.com
Om du har tankar att resa till Bali så gör det!! Jag älskar Bali och vet att jag ska tillbaka!!
Sov så sött....