We are building a second resort. It stands on the ridge directly above the one we have run for years, on the same private island, and it opens in April 2027. It is called Hilltop Komodo Resort, it has two kinds of bungalow — Hilltop Sunrise spread along the ridge and Hilltop Sunset at the highest point of it — and it is open for booking now, before it opens, at 40% off the published rate.
This is the long version. The Hilltop pre-sale page carries the rates and the enquiry form; what follows is what is actually being built up there, how a stay on the hill works alongside the beach resort and the Komodo dive centre below it, and how the pre-sale offer works in detail, including the parts that are less flattering to us.
One thing before anything else, because it should govern how you look at the pictures. Hilltop does not exist yet. Every image in this article is an architectural render of the finished resort, not a photograph of it, and the site is under construction while you read this. We would rather put that in the third sentence than have you work it out later and wonder what else we were vague about.
Where It Is, and Why Up the Hill
Komodo Resort sits on Sebayur Besar, a private island about 18 kilometres from Labuan Bajo, which is a 30-minute boat ride from the harbour. That has always been the point of the place: you are inside the archipelago rather than commuting into it each morning, with more than thirty dive sites between ten and sixty minutes away by boat and the central ones around twenty. If the geography is new to you, our Komodo island map shows where the island sits in relation to the park, and the Labuan Bajo travel guide covers the town you fly into.
Hilltop is not a different island or a different bay. It is the same island at a different elevation. The existing resort is arranged along the beach, at sea level, looking out across the water at the islands opposite. Hilltop is up on the ridge behind it, and the difference that makes is hard to overstate: instead of looking along the water you are looking down over it, at the islands stacked up one behind another into the distance.
If you have hiked Padar Island at dawn with three hundred other people for that photograph, you already know the view. It is the same country, seen from a private deck with a coffee instead of from a queue on a staircase. That comparison is the single honest reason this resort is being built up a hill rather than extended along the sand, and everything else in this article follows from it.
Between the two properties is a short walk down the hill. That sentence is worth reading twice if you are a diver, and there is a section further down about why.
What a Hilltop Bungalow Actually Is
Raised to canopy height
Each bungalow stands on stilts, so the floor sits level with the tops of the trees around it rather than on the ground among them. The front of the room is glass from end to end and opens onto a private deck with a railing and nothing between you and the sea.
They are also spread out along the hillside rather than lined up in a row, which is a decision that costs money in construction and buys the thing people actually notice: you are not looking into someone else’s room, and nobody is looking into yours. On a hill, where every building has a sightline over the one below it, that has to be designed in from the start or it cannot be fixed afterwards.
Inside
The rooms are quiet and uncluttered rather than busy: warm timber floors, woven wall panels, a long desk running under the window, a deep sofa, and a walk-in wardrobe area, which is a small thing that matters a great deal by day three of a dive week when the alternative is a suitcase on the floor. The bathroom is finished in stone, with a walk-in rain shower and a window into the greenery.
The bedding can be arranged as a double or as singles, and there is room for an extra bed for a child or a third guest, which is where the maximum of three per bungalow comes from. In terms of the fittings that decide whether a room is comfortable to be in for a week rather than a night: air conditioning throughout, a coffee machine, a writing desk, reading lights, free WiFi, and a 24-hour front office to ask for anything the room does not have.
What the rooms are not is enormous. This is a resort built around a view and a hillside, not a collection of villas with private plunge pools, and the honest description is a well-finished, generously glazed, quiet room in a spectacular position. If your priority is floor area, our Komodo Resort rooms down at sea level include larger options.
Sunrise or Sunset: The Only Real Decision
There are two kinds of bungalow, and they are finished to exactly the same standard. The difference is where they sit on the hill and which way they point, so this is a genuine choice rather than an upsell ladder.
The Hilltop Sunrise bungalows run along the ridge facing east across the channel, with roughly 180 degrees of ocean in front of them. First light arrives through the glass wall while you are still in bed, which either sounds wonderful to you or sounds like being woken up early, and both reactions are valid. They are the lower of the two rates.
The Hilltop Sunset bungalows sit at the very top of the ridge facing west. Nothing is built above them, nothing interrupts the sightline, and the end of the day happens directly in front of the room: the sun drops behind the islands and the light comes in low through the full-height glass and across the deck. They cost more, and it is worth being precise about why. You are paying for the position on the hill, not for a better room. The specification is identical.
If you cannot decide, the useful question is not which view is better but which time of day you actually like. People who dive all day and want to be horizontal by nine tend to prefer waking up to the Sunrise view. People whose favourite part of a holiday is the hour before dinner with a drink should pay the difference for Sunset.
Everything Up There Too
Hilltop is not an annexe with a shuttle. It runs as a complete resort in its own right, which was the expensive decision at the centre of the whole project, and it means a stay up there works without walking down the hill unless you want to.
Its own restaurant. An open-sided dining pavilion under a sculptural timber roof, looking down over the pool to the sea. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are served up on the ridge; you do not have to descend for a meal. The restaurant at Komodo Resort below continues exactly as it is, and guests of either property are welcome at both.
An infinity pool. Set into the hillside at the edge of the ridge, with loungers on the terrace around it. The position is the whole point: the water finishes where the hill drops away, and the view over the edge is the same panorama the bungalows have.
A spa. Dedicated to Hilltop and separate from our existing spa and wellness centre down at the beach, so a massage after diving does not depend on what the other property has free.
A 24-hour front office. Staffed independently, so there is always someone up there to ask, and you are not walking down a hill at ten at night to sort out a transfer time.
The Resort Below, and Why You Might Want Both
Almost everyone who comes to this island comes for the water, so this section matters more than the architecture.
The diving operation does not move. Our PADI dive centre in Komodo stays where it is, on the beach at Komodo Resort, and that is where the boats leave from and come back to. The house reef is still directly off the sand, which is one of the genuinely underrated things about the place: you can walk into the water with a snorkel between dives and find something worth looking at. The full spread of Komodo dive sites is reached the same way it always has been, and our overview of scuba diving in Komodo National Park covers what the diving is actually like, currents included.
So a Hilltop guest who dives walks down the hill in the morning and back up it in the evening. That is the trade, stated plainly. In exchange you get a room with a view most people hike for, and a restaurant, pool and spa that are quieter than the ones at sea level because far fewer rooms share them.
Guests are free to use both properties during a stay, in both directions. Beach guests can eat dinner up at the Hilltop restaurant for the sunset; Hilltop guests can spend the whole day on the sand and never climb the hill until bedtime. Nothing about the pre-sale changes the diving, the boats, the schedules or the prices of any of it.
The Pre-Sale: How the 40% Actually Works
Here is the offer in one sentence: any booking made directly with us before Hilltop opens takes 40% off the published rate, you choose your dates later, and you can have your money back if you change your mind.
The rest of this section is the detail behind that sentence, because a pre-sale is exactly the sort of offer where the detail is the whole thing.
What the discount is measured against
The 40% comes off the published rate, which is the rate Hilltop will sell at once it opens. The Hilltop rates table shows both figures side by side: the pre-sale price you pay now, and the published rate struck through above it. We keep those numbers in one place on the site rather than repeating them across articles, so that page is always the current version and this one cannot quietly go out of date.
What the rate covers
Rates are per bungalow per night, not per person, and they come in three plans: full board with breakfast, lunch and dinner; bed and breakfast; or room only. Tax and service charge are included in the figure you see, which is not universal in Indonesia and is worth checking wherever else you are comparing prices. An extra adult or child in the bungalow has its own rate, and the two bungalow types are priced separately, Sunset above Sunrise.
Diving, boat transfers and national park fees are arranged separately, exactly as they are for the beach resort. That is deliberate: almost nobody wants the same dive package, and bundling it would mean charging non-divers for boats they never board. If you want a sense of the full cost of a trip rather than a room, our guide to Komodo island trip cost breaks down where the money goes, and how to get to Komodo covers the flights and the transfer.
How the dates work
You do not have to choose your dates now, and this is the part people most often assume is too good to be true.
You reserve at the pre-sale rate, and you pick your dates whenever you are ready, as long as they fall between the April 2027 opening and the end of December 2028. That is a window of about twenty-one months to aim at, which is enough to build a trip around a school holiday, a wedding anniversary or a friend who has not decided whether to come. If your plans change after you have chosen, the dates can be moved.
The booking does not expire either. It does not lapse quietly after ninety days and it does not turn into a voucher with conditions. It holds until you use it.
If you change your mind
The booking is fully refundable. You can cancel and have your money back.
We wrote it that way on purpose, and the reasoning is not complicated: we are asking you to pay for a room in a building that is not finished, on the strength of drawings and whatever our name is worth to you. A non-refundable deposit on that basis would be asking you to carry a risk that is properly ours.
How to book it
Through us, directly. The 40% applies to bookings made with us and not through the booking platforms, which is the entire reason we can afford to offer it: the commission that would otherwise go to an intermediary is what funds the discount.
In practice: tell us which bungalow type you want, Sunrise or Sunset, and which meal plan, and we will hold it. Dates can come later. The Hilltop pre-sale enquiry form goes straight to the right desk, and a real person replies to it.
Why Sell a Resort Before It Exists
It is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a marketing one.
A pre-sale at this size is a trade. You are taking on the discomfort of booking something you cannot walk around yet. We are taking the certainty of knowing that people want it, months before the first guest arrives, which is worth a great deal when you are finishing a build on an island where every sack of cement arrives by boat.
Forty percent is what we think that discomfort is worth. It is a genuinely large discount, larger than we will ever run again on these rooms once they are open, and the refundable terms exist so that the discomfort has a floor: the worst case for you is that you get your money back, and the worst case for us is that we were wrong about the demand.
What we are not doing is pretending to be short of rooms to hurry you along. There is no countdown clock on the offer, and the pre-sale rate is available until we open in April 2027. If it helps you decide, read the pre-sale terms and take a week over it.
Who Hilltop Suits, and Who Should Stay on the Beach
We would rather you booked the right room than the more expensive one, so here is the unvarnished version.
Hilltop suits couples and honeymooners, for whom the view and the quiet are most of the point — our guide to Komodo for couples covers the wider trip. It suits people who want a resort holiday with diving in it rather than a dive trip with a bed attached. It suits anyone who has done the Padar hike and thought, memorably, that they would like to sit down and look at this for longer. And it suits repeat guests who already know the island and want a different angle on it.
The beach rooms suit divers doing four days of two- and three-tank trips, who will be up early and tired by evening and would rather have the boat and the dive centre thirty seconds from the door. They suit anyone with knees, hips or lungs that would rather not negotiate a hill twice a day; be honest with yourself about that one, and ask us if you are unsure. They suit families of four or more, because a Hilltop bungalow takes three guests and the beach has bungalows built for families — our guide to Komodo with kids goes into the practicalities. And they suit anyone who wants to be in the water twenty times a day off the house reef.
If you are weighing it up against everything else in the region rather than against our own rooms, our comparison of where to stay in Komodo is deliberately even-handed about liveaboards, town hotels and island resorts, and choosing a Komodo island resort covers what to look for generally.
When to Come
April 2027 is not an accidental opening date. It lands at the start of the long good stretch: seas settling, visibility building, and the whole park easier to reach on more days of the week. Our guide to the best time to visit Komodo Island lays out the year properly, and the Komodo dive season goes into what changes underwater month by month.
If you are choosing dates inside that twenty-one-month window, two things are worth knowing. The high months of July and August are busy everywhere in the park and the rates elsewhere reflect it, so the shoulder months are better value and better diving; and the green months at the turn of the year are quieter, greener and far more rewarding than their reputation, which is the argument our article on Komodo in January makes at length. Mantas, for what it is worth, are a cool-water story, and swimming with manta rays in Komodo explains when the numbers at the cleaning stations are highest.
For a first visit, five nights is the shortest stay that does not feel rushed, and a week is better. That applies whichever hill you sleep on.
Between Now and April 2027
Construction is under way on the ridge. What that looks like in practice is a slow, weather-dependent build on an island with no road access, which is the same set of constraints that shaped the original resort and, we think, part of why the place feels the way it does.
We will keep the Hilltop page current as it goes up, and the renders in this article will be replaced by photographs of the finished bungalows when there are photographs to publish. If you have booked in the pre-sale you will hear from us before then.
If you are interested but not ready, the useful thing to do is ask a question. Tell us who is coming, roughly when, and what you want out of the trip, and we will tell you honestly whether Hilltop or the beach is the better room for it — including when the answer is the cheaper one. The Hilltop enquiry form is the fastest route to someone who knows the answer.
