The blasts at the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels, located side-by-side in an upscale business district in the capital, blew out windows and scattered debris and glass across the street, kicking up a thick plume of smoke. Facades of both the hotels were reduced to twisted metal.
The blasts happened at around 8:00 am local time.
A third explosion was reported near a shopping complex in the north of the Indonesian capital several hours later, but the police later denied initial reports that it was also caused by a bomb.
"I heard two sounds like 'boom, boom' coming from the Marriott and the Ritz-Carlton. Then I saw people running out," the security guard, Mr Eko Susanto, told the agency.
Blood was spattered on the street outside the Marriott and hundreds of police sealed off the area, an agency correspondent said.
The bombings were the first major attack in Indonesia since a series of suicide bombings on the resort island of Bali in 2005 which were blamed on the Al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah Islamic militant group.
"These were high explosive bombs," the coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, Mr Widodo Adi Sucipto, told reporters at the scene.
"This destroys our conducive situation," Mr Sucipto said, referring to the nearly four years since a major terrorist attack in Indonesia — a triple suicide bombing at restaurants at the resort island of Bali that killed 20 people.
Windows were blown out of a second-storey restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton, but there was little damage to the Marriott that was visible from the outside.
The police said one blast hit the basement of the Marriott and a second struck the restaurant of the Ritz-Carlton at the peak breakfast hour.
Another witness told the agency that he saw several foreigners covered in blood in the immediate aftermath of the explosion at the Marriott.
The national police spokesman, Mr Nanan Soekarna, confirmed at least nine people were killed and 41 were injured in the hotel blasts, including 14 foreigners.
Mr Sucipto said and the police said a New Zealander was among those killed, and that thirteen other foreigners were among the wounded, including nationals from Australia, Canada, India, the Netherlands, Norway, South Korea and the US.
Earlier, South Jakarta police Colonel, Mr Firman Bundi, said that four foreigners were killed, but gave no details.
"I don't remember exactly but suddenly the ceiling is falling down and the sound was big," Mr Cho In Sang, 50-year-old South Korean who was staying at the Ritz-Carlton, told the agency at the Metropolitan Medical Centre (MMC) hospital.
Mr Cho, who was lying on a hospital bed with cuts and scratches on his arms and legs, said the hotel staff had put him in a car and driven him to the hospital.
The police said it was too early to say whether the bombs were planted by Islamic militants as in the attacks that killed 12 people at the Jakarta Marriott in 2003 and more than 200 in Bali in 2002.
Indonesia's President, Mr Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who was re-elected to a second term in the mainly Muslim country last week, was "deeply concerned over this incident," a spokesman for his office said.
The Islamic militant network Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) has been blamed for a string of bombings on local and western targets in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia in recent years.
As well as the 2002 Bali bombings and 2003 Marriott attack, JI was also blamed for a suicide attack on the Australian embassy in Jakarta in 2004 which left 10 dead and a second attack in Bali in 2005 which killed 20.
JI has been linked by western governments to the Al-Qaeda network and key JI leader Hambali, who was arrested in Thailand in 2003, was handed over to US custody and is being detained at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
The Indonesian authorities arrested many of the top leaders of the JI in the aftermath of the Bali bombings and analysts believed the organisation had been severely weakened.
However several key members remained at large including top bomb-maker Noordin Mohammed Top, a Malaysian.
Three members of the JI were executed in November last year for their role in the 2002 bombings in Bali, and analysts warned at the time there could be reprisal attacks.
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