The Run Club That Ran Out of Country: Bali's Entourage Scandal

Just after sunrise on the back roads of Canggu, they were hard to miss: a hundred and fifty runners moving in a loose pack, every one of them wearing wireless headphones, music pumping from a DJ rig mounted on a vehicle rolling alongside. A silent disco at seven in the morning, threading past warungs opening for the day. This was Entourage Run, one of the hottest tickets in Bali’s expat fitness scene — and to the Indonesians watching it glide past, effectively invitation-only.

Then the screenshots started circulating.

The +62 problem

Applicants noticed a pattern in the club’s registration flow, and posted the receipts: sign-ups with Indonesian +62 phone numbers were rejected or left hanging, while foreign numbers sailed through. One woman reported her application was postponed after she entered an Indonesian name and number — her husband, applying with a foreign number, was approved immediately. A reply circulated in screenshots told one applicant the platform was “intended for digital nomads.” A 23-year-old Indonesian woman described being turned away after stating her citizenship.

The club’s explanation, when the outrage arrived, was that an automated approval process had developed “a bias affecting some Indonesian phone numbers.” It apologised on Instagram — the mission had “always been to build a welcoming community” — and suspended all events. The algorithm-ate-my-homework defence found few takers: whatever the mechanism, the outcome had been a foreigners-only club operating on Indonesian soil, filtering out the people whose country it was.

“It’s not your hometown”

The clips that carried the story — catalogued in a widely shared chronology by the X user @sulungonten — gave the anger a second grievance. They showed a pack of dozens, at times more than a hundred, filling the width of a Canggu road in the early morning — an exclusive club holding its gatherings on public streets that locals were expected to edge around.

The replies were specific, and worth hearing. “The last time I went to Bali I couldn’t feel Bali any more — I felt like a stranger in my own country,” wrote Deey Dienar (@sundeeybean), complaining of “too many broke bule” — the Indonesian word for Western foreigners — “drifting around but full of style,” and calling for residence permits to be tightened. “What’s so special about bule?” asked Agung Hikmati (@HikmatiAgung), arguing that many have become a blight on society out of all proportion to their contribution to Bali’s economy.

Josh Fothergill, a British runner who has lived in Indonesia for years, put it more gently and no less firmly: “Please respect the locals, because it’s not your hometown.”

Then Ni Luh Djelantik — the Balinese shoe designer turned member of Indonesia’s regional representative council — went to capital letters: “BALI IS NOT YOUR HOME! TRASHY TOURISTS LIKE YOU ARE A DISGRACE.” She demanded that immigration and the police examine the club’s event permits and its organisers’ stay status.

Within two days, immigration did exactly that.

Wednesday flight, Friday blacklist

The two founders — Dutch nationals identified by immigration as JAS, 35, and HQV, 37 — flew out of Ngurah Rai to Singapore on Wednesday evening, a departure officials pointedly described as voluntary. On Friday, the Directorate General of Immigration announced they had been blacklisted: not deported — they were already gone — but barred from coming back.

Director General Hendarsam Marantoko’s explanation is worth quoting in full, because it will be cited in Bali for years: “There should not be a state within a state. We consider this running club to be functioning as a ‘state within a state.’”

Here is the twist that most of the viral commentary missed. The formal violation sat entirely in immigration law: organising events without the required authorisation, and inconsistent with the purpose of their stay permits. Discrimination never entered the charge sheet. JAS held a work-based KITAS — Indonesia’s limited-stay permit, tied to a specific employer and role. HQV held an investor KITAS, which permits owning and overseeing a company, and pointedly does not permit running one’s own event series on the side. The visa sponsor, PT SIG, has been summoned to explain itself, and the Bali immigration office has been ordered to look into other event organisers on the island.

Every nerve at once

Reading the fury as simple hostility to foreigners misses how many separate anxieties this one club managed to press.

The first is the paradox Bali lives inside. The island’s economy breathes through its visitors — a figure widely cited in the online debate put its tourism foreign-exchange contribution to the nation at Rp176 trillion, roughly $11 billion, for 2025 — Plenty of Balinese, in quieter moments, dream of an island with room to breathe again; plenty of others hold no illusions about the jobs, the warungs and the drivers that tourism money keeps alive. Between those poles, the complaint about this club was narrower and harder to fix: that the island’s hosts should never feel like extras in someone else’s morning routine.

The second anxiety points at Jakarta. As a Balinese user posting as Mangnik (@mangnik) argued, the policies that filled the island were written in the capital — the visa-on-arrival regime, the national OSS licensing system that issues business permits with little regard for local spatial plans. Bali absorbs the consequences of doors other people opened, and the permit machinery that failed here answers to the centre, only partly to the island.

Beneath both sits the oldest layer. Bali is a Hindu island with its own language, calendar and ritual life inside a Muslim-majority, Java-centred state, and it has spent decades defending that distinctiveness against pressure from the centre as much as from abroad. A foreigners-only club running on Balinese roads pressed every one of those nerves at once: the visitors who take too much, the capital that decides too much, and the fear that what makes the island itself is being crowded out of its own mornings.

What they should have done

The compliance failure here is specific, and fixable — which is what makes it a lesson rather than just a spectacle.

“There are several layers to this,” Marlissa Lahi, founder of the market-entry firm Emerhub, told InsideASEAN. “The regulatory mistake was running events on the wrong permit. A stay permit is tied to specific activities — you cannot simply launch a commercial event series on the side. The sponsoring company needs the event-organiser classification in its licences, and an investor-KITAS holder is not allowed to run the company’s day-to-day operations, which is exactly what organising events is. For that you appoint a manager, or obtain a work permit yourself.”

The irony is that the legal route was open the whole time: the event-organiser classification is available to foreign-owned companies. A properly licensed PT PMA with the right KBLI code, a local manager or a work KITAS for the operator, event permits for the gatherings — none of it exotic, all of it routine paperwork for anyone who asks before launching.

“What escalated this far beyond a paperwork issue was the sense of unfairness,” Lahi added. “Excluding locals is never a good idea, in any foreign country.”

The crackdown this landed in

Timing mattered too. The blacklist did not come out of nowhere: it landed inside a multi-year campaign against misbehaving foreigners in Bali, where officials have grown openly fed up with illegal employment, norm violations and foreigner-run businesses operating outside their permits. The island hosts one of the largest foreign communities in Southeast Asia, and for years enforcement was patchy enough that the line between a hobby and an unlicensed business blurred comfortably. That era is closing. A viral scandal now functions as a targeting system: public outrage points, immigration checks the permits, and the permits rarely hold up.

That is the real formula this week demonstrated, and every foreigner running “a little something” in Bali should write it down: wrong-scope visa activity plus virality equals a re-entry ban. The discrimination made the club infamous. The paperwork made the ban easy.

A run club, of all things, should have understood the basics: know the course, respect the locals, and do not pretend the rules are for other people. Entourage’s founders got the dawn starts right and everything else wrong — and the country they treated as a backdrop has quietly informed them that the course is closed.

This account draws on reporting by ANTARA News, the Jakarta Globe and Dimsum Daily, each linked above, together with public reactions posted on X and a statement provided to the author by Emerhub; facts were verified independently against primary reporting, and any errors are our own.