Quy Nhon: The best and worst of urban development in Vietnam in one city

My 2023 trip report for Quy Nhon, the city that could be the next big thing in Vietnam.

Quy Nhon is the capital of Binh Dinh province in the South Central Coast region of Vietnam. It’s not a household name outside of Vietnam, so new visitors to the city might be surprised to find a pleasant city of about half a million people that has a beachfront.

It has been making the news in recent years as the next big thing in Vietnam travel. A major Australian news outlet recently ran a story about why you need to visit Vietnam’s next big beach destination now. The city has also made the press for the luxury train that runs from Danang to Quy Nhon.

News outlets have been taking liberties with how to describe Quy Nhon, such as the Maldives of Vietnam or Cancun without the crowds. It’s not remotely like any of those places, but it has some truly great beaches and stunning coastlines that dazzle on sunny days.

I visited Quy Nhon in Jan/Feb 2023, and I also visited the Phuong Mai Peninsula for the first time. This is technically part of Quy Nhon City, even though it feels like another place. This peninsula is now being developed for tourism and industrial purposes.

This was my third time in Quy Nhon, and I’m still impressed with what a well-planned city it is and its future potential. On the other hand, the Phuong Mai Peninsula is making the same mistakes that so many other tourism developments in Vietnam have already made.

I was here at the end of the cool season and at the tail end of a polar vortex that was messing around with the weather in Southeast Asia. My photos of this trip do not do any justice to the coast, and I ended up skipping some beaches because of this.

This is my trip report for Quy Nhon, where you can see the best and worst of city development in Vietnam.

Quy Nhon City

On my last visit to Quy Nhon, the city was renovating sections of the beachfront streets and drainage. The streets are now sealed, and the beachfront parks are fully landscaped. One of the things that Quy Nhon does right is that there is a park between the beach and the beachfront road.

Some big hotel and apartment projects were planned when I was last here, so I did a walk around to check the progress. The TMS Building was just having the finishing touches when I was last here, and there was branding on the building for a Pullman Hotel. It appears that Pullman has pulled out of Quy Nhon, though I can’t find any news releases about this. This would have been the first international brand to plant its flag on the beach at Quy Nhon.

It appears that the momentum that Quy Nhon carried during the pandemic has stalled. I was here a week after Tet (the lunar holiday in Vietnam), so workers should have been back on site. The Sailing Quy Nhon/I-Tower project was a hole in the ground when I visited in 2020. It looked about half finished, but no workers were on site.

The most central beach location has gone through different owners, and it’s now known as Cadia Quy Nhon.

Part of what makes Quy Nhon such an appealing city is that it’s a city by the sea, surrounded by mountains. The city is limited in how far it can sprawl, so the only way is up. The Grand Center Quy Nhon is another residential tower that was an empty lot on my last visit, and it has now made progress.

When you travel around Vietnam, you’ll notice that developers have cities where they are dominant. Quy Nhon is an FLC town, and this conglomerate bet big on Quy Nhon. Bamboo Airways is owned by the FLC Group, and they selected Phu Cat (the airport of Quy Nhon) as their main hub outside of Hanoi and HCMC.

At the southern end of the beach are FLC Sea Tower and FLC City Hotel. Both of these towers have been completed since my last visit.

Good thing that they were finished, because FLC has been in rocky waters over the last year. In March 2022, the FLC chairman was arrested for stock manipulation.

The news has since been filled with less-than-flattering coverage of the company, referring to Trinh Van Quyet as the disgraced former FLC Group chairman while authorities auctioned off two of his Rolls-Royces. A yacht owned by the company was also put up for auction.

These FLC troubles are a brief background for what is coming up next on the peninsula.

Phuong Mai Peninsula

The Phuong Mai Peninsula is reached from Quy Nhon City by the Thi Nai Bridge, which was, at the time of construction in 2008, the longest sea bridge in Vietnam. The bridge has opened up the peninsula for development, for which the province has big plans. For this area, I rented a motorbike to drive around. Here I am with my FLC fake helmet (obviously not sponsored by FLC Group).

I first wanted to have a look at the Merryland project at the southern end of the peninsula. I’ve been seeing advertising for this project all over the country, including at the Quy Nhon airport.

Merryland is set in a valley with a small beach. They are building a new road and some bridges over a lake to get there, but it was closed to traffic when I went. I could see some construction in the distance poking its head up over the hillside. I will come back when it is open, but I am already concerned about the rows of shophouses in an isolated area.

I went back up the peninsula to the area marked as Nhon Hoi New City. This is another project I have been noticing advertising for. Mind you, I get targeted ads on Facebook because I am always looking at such projects. The ads at least let me know what sites are still actively looking for investors.

Nhon Hoi New City is a new urban area that has been marked out amidst the dunes of the peninsula. The roads have been laid out, and some trees have been planted, but there are no buildings yet.

The New City is going down the same path as other single-developer urban areas I have seen around the country. The style is to build rows of identical shophouses and cookie-cutter villas. The worst of this can be seen in Phu Quoc, where developers get to build an entirely new urban area instead of letting it organically grow like a normal city.

Scrolling through the images on the website (https://nhonhoi-newcity.vn/), I am seeing the same nonsense that has been built in Phu Quoc.

I’ve written about this before (building better new cities in Southeast Asia), where developers shouldn’t have complete control over a new urban area. Instead, a new area should be gridded out and developed one block at a time. If one developer fails, then it doesn’t take down the whole area with it.

I won’t post the images here, but if you click through to the website, you can see what we are dealing with here. Rows of shophouses that have little chance of being a thriving business district, and illogical street layouts that look like they were inspired by a suburban housing development in Florida.

I rode to the main FLC resort, or at least to the security gate where I could see the resort from a distance. I have seen this resort numerous times in advertising. FLC use it as part of hotel and flight packages with Bamboo Airways.

Behind the FLC resort is FLC Luxcity, which is a new urban development that has been abandoned. There was a security guard, so I didn’t go inside. You can see the extent of how much has been built and abandoned by looking on Google Maps. If you click satellite view, you can see the abandoned buildings in this area.

Shophouses for Luxcity have been built along the main road, and they are all abandoned except for one shop where I had an ice cream break.

The shophouse madness continues nearby with Eo Gia “Homeliday” site. This is another shophouse and villa development where the advertising makes it look like a 24-hour festival.

I’ve seen enough of these single-developer developments in Vietnam to see that they don’t work. Quy Nhon should just copy the layout of the old city area. Grid out an area, and developers can only develop one block at a time. So if a big developer runs into trouble (like FLC is now), then we are not left with an entire area of abandoned buildings.