The Best Places in Vietnam

The smell of freshly roasted beans hits you before you're through the door, which is probably the point. RAAW is a specialty coffee roastery and café in Thanh Xuân, fitted out in the kind of stripped-back minimalism that lets the coffee do the talking. Pour-overs and cold brews are the moves here. Laptops are quietly tolerated, and the room stays calm enough that you might actually get something done.

Stone fireplaces and rattan lampshades sit inside rooms that blend French colonial bones with Vietnamese village details, about an hour outside Hanoi in the Ba Vi mountains. The Meliá resort offers a spa using locally sourced ingredients, a restaurant mixing Vietnamese and international cooking, and a colonial-era terrace bar where local spirits and mountain views compete for your attention. The kind of place where the city feels further than it is.

A Neapolitan-style pizza spot in the international enclave of Phu My Hung, where the dough is contemporary and the crust comes out soft and pronouncedly airy. The menu reaches beyond pizza into arancini, fried nibbles, and regional Italian dishes, with an all-Italian wine list to match. Bright, plant-touched room, relaxed vibe, the kind of place you bring the whole table. It holds a spot on 50 Top Pizza World.

A twelve-room boutique hotel on Unicorn Island in the Mekong Delta, which is either the best address in Vietnam or something a child made up, and it turns out to be both. The style is classic craftsmanship over design theatrics, the pace is slow by design, and the restaurant mixes Vietnamese cooking with French fare named for the hotelier's grandparents. Bicycles and local markets fill the gaps. The Michelin Guide has selected it among its hotels.

The resort isn't accessible by road, so you arrive by boat, which sets the tone rather well. Each of the 37 timber villas comes with a private pool, a veranda, and a patch of jungle, plus a butler who handles everything from excursions to existential indecision. The spa leans on spring water treatments, the rooftop bar has sweeping views of the bay, and the beach is the kind that makes you territorial about telling people.

The villas here are shaped after the Vietnamese conical hat, which is either a clever nod to local craft or the most photogenic architectural joke on Bai Dai Beach. This Cam Ranh resort spreads between mountains and the South China Sea, with rooms running from garden-view standards up to lagoon pool villas. The beachfront Ana Beach House draws people in with open-fire cooking and fresh-caught seafood, and a spa sits at the quieter end of the grounds.

The architecture draws from the ancient Champa civilization, so latticed screens and handmade ceramics run through the whole resort, most visibly at a restaurant where dishes arrive in clay pots beside a working pottery studio. Tropical forest on one side, the South China Sea on the other, seven restaurants and bars in between, and a spa using ingredients grown on the property. A full-scale beach resort, in other words, and a committed one.

Private-pool villas sit between the South China Sea and a calm lake on Bai Dai beach, one of southern Vietnam's quieter stretches of coastline. This neoclassical villa resort has a grandeur unusual for a beach property, with arched gold-accented public spaces and leather-furnished lounges that feel more European drawing room than tropical escape. The YHI Spa sits lakeside, and Cam Ranh International Airport is ten minutes away, which is either convenient or suspicious depending on your plans.

The tallest building in Tay Ninh, this five-star hotel gives upper-floor rooms a direct sightline to Mount Ba Den that nothing else in town can match. The fifth-floor indoor pool sits under a glass ceiling that floods it with natural light, and the YHI Spa rounds out the recovery options. Dau Tieng Lake and Ma Thien Lan Valley are close enough to justify using it as a proper base for the region. The Michelin Guide has it among its Selected Hotels.

The resort bar is called Mojito's and serves mojitos made from fresh sugarcane, which tells you almost everything about how this place operates. Low-slung, grass-roofed buildings nestle into the coastal hills above a private palm-fringed beach so thoroughly that the whole resort half-disappears into the landscape. Rooms are generous even at the basic level, with four-poster beds and spa-style bathrooms, and snorkel gear, beach yoga, and breakfast in bed all come at no extra charge.

All-villa resort on a private beach at the base of Fairy Mountain, looking out at Turtle Island and the South China Sea. Villas run from garden-view doubles to ocean-facing suites the size of a small apartment, with wide balconies and separate lounges standard. Dining includes Hispania, Asia's first outpost of chef Marcos Morán's celebrated Spanish kitchen. A coral restoration program gives guests something to feel good about between meals.

A former Governor's mansion on the banks of the Perfume River, facing the imperial citadel across the water, this Art Deco boutique hotel carries its colonial past lightly: ceiling fans, French doors, the occasional four-poster bed. The pace is deeply unhurried, the multilingual staff is polished, and the saltwater pool and spa make it feel more like a resort than a city hotel. Hue suits that mood perfectly.

Terraced rice fields carved into the mountains by the Hmong community over centuries sit right outside the window, which is the whole point of being here. This resort in Lao Cai Province is the only one of its kind in Mù Cang Chải, its bamboo architecture and brocade details borrowing from the surrounding culture rather than ignoring it. Pool villas mirror the mountain skyline; the Charcoal Grill handles open-fire highland cooking after dark.

Balconies facing Ha Long Bay's limestone karsts are available at multiple room tiers, and springing for one is an easy argument to make. This large international luxury resort sits on the Ha Long Marina waterfront with close to 300 rooms, from standard garden-facing options up to multi-bedroom villas. Restaurants cover fresh seafood, Cantonese, and Viet-French; excursions onto the UNESCO-listed bay, with its islands and floating villages, are straightforwardly arranged.

Dining inside a 125-year-old church is one option; a traditional Vietnamese tea house is another. This small luxury resort sits within the Trang An World Heritage Site, surrounded by the karst peaks of northern Vietnam, and the architecture threads local tradition through a quietly colonial, contemporary lens. Rooms range from suites to standalone villas. The spa and pool handle the easy days; the valley outside handles the rest.

The entire resort is built around a fiction: designer Bill Bensley invented a French colonial university, complete with academic departments, student records, and a quiet closure in the 1940s. None of it existed. Each building plays along, so the spa occupies the old mycology wing, done up in full Alice in Wonderland surrealism. A beach resort on Phu Quoc where the theming is the attraction, and the beach is genuinely beautiful too.

Yen Tu Mountain is considered the birthplace of Vietnamese Buddhism, and this luxury resort sits at its base, built to look like a traditional palace and monastery because apparently the bar for hotel theming can be set very high. No TVs anywhere, but the rooms have forest-facing windows, dark wood paneling, copper lamps, and private balconies on many floors. Staying here means beating the pilgrimage crowds to the pagodas at dawn, which is its own reward.

More than 500 private-pool villas arranged around a central lagoon on Phu Quoc's Gulf of Thailand beachfront: this is a resort that functions less like a hotel and more like a small town. The contemporary-colonial villas run from one to four bedrooms, and the usual scale amenities, spa, yoga, kids' program, and watersports, are all here. Being part of the wider Vinpearl complex quietly doubles the options without requiring any extra effort.

Gold-trimmed columns, fan-motif wall panels, and a cascading crystal chandelier greet you at this grand city hotel on the Nhat Le River in Dong Hoi. Rooms in the deluxe tier look over rooftops to the water, and the heated indoor pool catches the river sunset through arched windows. Son Doong Cave and Phong Nha-Ke Bang are both manageable day trips from here, which makes the location do a lot of work.

Each of the 366 villas at this Khem Beach resort comes with its own private pool and tropical garden, which means you can go an entire day without seeing another guest if that's your ambition. The interiors lean quietly contemporary, warmed by local materials and crafts. Kitchenettes make the villas practically self-sufficient, though the restaurants run from a poolside bar to Italian and pan-Asian options whenever solitude loses its appeal.

A resort that occupies an entire peninsula at Phu Quoc's southern tip, surrounded by the Gulf of Thailand on both sides. The 215 villas each come with a private pool, and many front their own stretch of beach, so the place functions less like a hotel than a small, well-staffed island. The main pool snakes lagoon-style between the two shorelines, and the Plumeria spa, multiple restaurants, and a kids' club mean checkout is mostly theoretical.

A Singapore-sized island off the coast of Cambodia isn't the most obvious resort destination, but Phu Quoc has been quietly building a case. Salinda is a resort of around a hundred suites and villas spread generously enough that it never feels full. Private balconies, rain showers, and king beds are standard throughout. A Thai-run spa, Vietnamese, Italian, and Indian dining, and a Night Market just beyond the gates round things out.

Handcrafted furniture and Vietnamese art fill the 127 rooms at this East Sea coastal resort, where private balconies look out over gardens or open water. The pool suites wrap a bedroom, living space, and bathroom around a terrace pool in a way that makes leaving feel optional. The kitchen moves between Vietnamese home cooking and something more ambitious depending on the hour. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

Thirty-nine stone-and-timber villas built into the rock face of Ham Rong Mountain at 1,555 meters, with views straight across Muong Hoa Valley to Fansipan. This mountain resort takes the local materials seriously, using indigenous textiles and custom furniture throughout, while the spa leans on herbal and traditional remedies rather than the usual generic menu. The kitchen does local recipes in a more considered register than you'd find down in the valley.

A 700-metre outdoor pool is the kind of detail that stops you mid-scroll, and Vinpearl Cua Sot earns it. This sprawling beach resort on Xuan Hai Beach in Ha Tinh sits across 42 private-pool villas tucked into tropical gardens, built for big family trips rather than quiet honeymoons. The YHI Spa is shaped around the lotus flower, and the largest water park in north-central Vietnam is right next door, so everyone finds their version of a good afternoon.