The World Bank/IMF annual meeting was held in this peninsular in the south of the Indonesian island, and every major resort along one coast was co-opted into either the meeting itself, or external meetings by the banks.
Deutsche and JPMorgan monopolized the Ritz-Carlton; the Institute of International Finance and its many delegates took over the Grand Hyatt; the St Regis hosted receptions for HSBC, among others.
Remarkably, though, some of these resorts still took ordinary tourists, who could occasionally be seen looking baffled by numerous layers of security and hundreds of people in suits networking in the hotel lobbies.
On the plus side, they pretty much had the beaches to themselves, though those at the Ayodya may have been distracted by the global markets awards presentation on the beach – particularly when Indonesia’s finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati collected her award, with some sort of amphibious tank discretely hidden in the bushes nearby.
Austerity
One could learn a bit from hotel selections. It was encouraging, in the new era of Imran Khan austerity, to find the chief executive of one of Pakistan’s largest banks billeted at the Holiday Inn.