Meet SONO Hotels & Resorts: Our Hospitality Operating Partner

Building a great hotel is one thing. Running one successfully every day is something else entirely.

As Geonet’s hospitality portfolio grows in Bali, we’ve been equally focused on what happens after construction is complete: who welcomes the guests, manages the rooms, runs the restaurants and bars, builds the team, oversees revenue and distribution, and ultimately brings each resort to life.

That is where SONO Hotels & Resorts comes in.

SONO has been appointed as hotel operator for two of Geonet’s major Bali hospitality developments: ELLE Resort & Beach Club Bali in Seminyak and The Wylder in Berawa.

The two resorts have very different personalities and audiences, but both are being developed around the same broader idea: today’s traveller wants more from a hotel than simply somewhere to sleep. Great food, wellness, social spaces, entertainment and experiences are increasingly part of the reason people choose where to stay.

For Geonet, choosing an operator that understands this wider lifestyle hospitality model was important from the beginning.

“We weren’t looking for someone to simply manage hotel rooms,” Chad Egan, CEO of Geonet. “Both ELLE and The Wylder are being designed as complete lifestyle destinations, and we needed an operator with experience across resorts, food and beverage, leisure and guest experience. SONO brings that depth, as well as a strong understanding of this region.”

SONO’s story began in South Korea in 1979, with the group entering the leisure sector in 1987 and expanding over the decades that followed into hotels, resorts and large-scale leisure destinations.

Today, SONO’s hospitality network spans 43 locations across seven countries, with an established portfolio in South Korea and a growing international presence across Asia-Pacific and beyond.

Its experience extends beyond traditional hotel operations. SONO has developed and operated large-scale resort destinations incorporating accommodation, restaurants and bars, leisure facilities, wellness, entertainment and other guest experiences.

That breadth is particularly relevant to what Geonet is developing in Bali.

SONO will operate both ELLE Resort & Beach Club and The Wylder, but that doesn’t mean the two properties will feel the same.

Quite the opposite.

ELLE Resort & Beach Club Bali is being developed as a luxury beachfront lifestyle resort in Seminyak, bringing together 168 rooms and suites with a major beach club, restaurants and bars, wellness, retail and guest experiences under the international ELLE brand.

The Wylder, Geonet’s newly launched lifestyle resort in Berawa, takes a different approach. It has been designed around how modern travellers, couples, families and groups increasingly want to stay—combining flexible accommodation with strong food and beverage, wellness, social spaces and experiences.

Food and beverage will play an important role in The Wylder, with Locavore Group involved in the culinary direction and Night Rooster contributing to the wider bar and lifestyle experience. Wellness and medical-spa experiences are also intended to form part of the broader resort offering.

The result is not simply a collection of hotel rooms. The aim is to create a destination where guests can stay, eat, socialise and focus on wellness within one connected resort experience.

For SONO, the challenge is to bring all of those individual elements together operationally.

For investors, this is an important question.

A hotel operator doesn’t simply arrive when construction is finished and start taking bookings.

SONO’s involvement extends across the pre-opening and operational stages of a resort. That can include operational planning, hotel systems, procurement, recruitment and training, reservations, distribution, revenue management and preparation for opening.

Once a resort is operating, the operator is responsible for the day-to-day hospitality business: the guest journey, rooms, service standards, staffing, restaurants and bars, operational systems, revenue management and distribution.

SONO’s wider operating platform includes central reservations, property-management systems, online travel agencies, global distribution and direct booking channels.

Geonet develops the projects. Our specialist partners help create the brands, design, food, wellness and experiences. SONO brings those elements together into the day-to-day operation of the resorts.

Each has a different role, and each brings specialist expertise.

The lifestyle hotel sector has changed significantly.

Travellers increasingly make decisions based on the entire experience around a hotel—not just the size of the room or the view from the balcony.

They care about where they can have dinner, where they'll meet friends for a drink, what they can do in the morning, the wellness facilities available to them and how connected the hotel feels to the destination around it.

That thinking sits behind both ELLE and The Wylder.

At ELLE, it means combining beachfront accommodation with a public-facing beach club, dining, wellness, retail, events and the wider lifestyle identity of the ELLE brand.

At The Wylder, it means creating a resort connected to the energy of Berawa, with accommodation sitting alongside high-end dining, bars and social spaces, wellness and recovery experiences.

For SONO, operating these resorts therefore requires expertise well beyond traditional rooms management.

“ELLE and The Wylder are completely different projects, and that’s exactly the point,” says Egan. “We’re not trying to build the same hotel over and over again. We’re creating resorts around the location, the guest and the experience we want to deliver. SONO gives us the operating depth behind that, while our lifestyle partners help us create experiences people will genuinely want to come to Bali for.”

SONO also brings an established customer and distribution network across Asia.

The group has a substantial customer base in South Korea, with the information provided to Geonet identifying more than 588,000 SONO members and more than 3.18 million online and mobile members.

South Korea is also an important tourism market for Bali. In 2025, Bali welcomed 346,680 Korean visitors, making South Korea the island’s fourth-largest international source market according to the research compiled for the SONO partnership.

The wider SONO group also owns T’way Air, which operates direct services between South Korea and Bali.

This doesn’t mean SONO members or airline passengers automatically become guests at Geonet resorts. What it does demonstrate is the breadth of SONO’s hospitality and travel ecosystem and its familiarity with a market that already represents an important part of Bali’s international visitor base.

SONO also already has an operating presence in Bali and a wider regional structure across Asia-Pacific.

For Geonet, that combination of regional knowledge and international operating experience was important.

The relationship between Geonet and SONO is bigger than one resort.

With SONO appointed to operate both ELLE Resort & Beach Club and The Wylder, we are building continuity across our growing hospitality portfolio while allowing each project to maintain its own identity.

The brands, locations, designs and guest experiences are intentionally different. What they will share is an experienced hotel operator working behind the scenes to turn those individual concepts into functioning hospitality businesses.

And ultimately, that is what a hotel operator has to do.

Beautiful architecture, strong brands, restaurants, wellness concepts and great locations all matter. But once the doors open, someone has to bring all of those elements together every day, for every guest.

For Geonet, that is the role SONO Hotels & Resorts will play as we move towards the next stage of our hospitality journey in Bali.