Rafa Nadal Just Backed The Indonesian Island Australians Keep Flying Past

Rafa Nadal is opening his first tennis centre in Southeast Asia, and he has not put it in Bali.

The Rafa Nadal Academy has confirmed that Samara Lombok, a 150-hectare coastal destination on the island’s south coast, will host the region’s first Rafa Nadal Tennis Centre when it opens in the first quarter of 2028. It joins a portfolio that already spans Mallorca, Kuwait, Hong Kong, Marbella, Greece, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

For an island most Australians still treat as a side trip from Seminyak, that is a serious vote of confidence.

Four Tennis Courts, Four Padel Courts, And A Very Deliberate Address

The centre will sit inside the Samara Sports Pavilion in the resort’s beach precinct, with four tennis courts and four padel courts. Programmes will run for players of every age and level, built on the coaching methodology Nadal and his technical team developed across more than two decades on tour.

Maribel Nadal, deputy general manager of the Rafa Nadal Academy, described Lombok as a destination with enormous international potential, which is diplomatic language for getting in early.

Nadal has been a fixture in the luxury lifestyle space for years, from celebrity superyacht projects to a growing academy network. This is the first time that footprint has reached Southeast Asia.

Co-founder Steve Ebsworth has framed Samara as a playground in the most literal sense, with tennis and padel sitting at the middle of it rather than tucked behind the spa.

The Resort Is Assembling A Guest List Most Openings Would Envy

Samara Lombok sits roughly 25 minutes from Lombok International Airport and will open as the first Destination by Hyatt in Southeast Asia. The first phase brings three boutique hotels and 150 of a planned 500 villas.

Twelve dining concepts are being curated by chef Will Meyrick alongside children’s cookery author Annabel Karmel MBE. Expedition outfit Rascal Voyages is running a marine biology and watersports centre, and a football training facility with a globally recognised club is still to be announced.

The interiors have already picked up Asia’s Best Hospitality Interior Design at the 2025 AADA, which is an unusual thing to win before you have opened.

UK family office Westgrove Partners committed capital in July to accelerate construction, locking in the Q1 2028 date.

Why Australians Should Care About A Resort That Opens In 2028

Australians remain Bali’s single largest source of visitors, and the developer cites 1.63 million arrivals in 2025, close to a quarter of every foreign arrival on the island. Most of that group has watched Bali go from discovery to gridlock in real time, on an island now fielding casino proposals and a superyacht marina at Benoa Harbour.

Lombok is a 35-minute flight away with an international airport, a MotoGP circuit at Mandalika that has already stress-tested the island’s infrastructure, and new direct routes from Australia coming online.

The ownership pitch is the part that will interest anyone who has looked at Bali property and walked away. Samara villas are structured on a 90-year lease term rather than the 25 to 30 years that is standard across the strait, with turnkey pricing starting from USD $650,000 across 12 designs and two to five bedroom configurations.

Whether Lombok becomes what Bali was thirty years ago is still an open question. Rafa Nadal has just made it a considerably more interesting one.