Hanoi’s oldest luxury hotel tested by new rivals in tourism wave

[HANOI] For decades, the Sofitel Legend Metropole stood alone as Hanoi’s only luxury hotel, a colonial-era grande dame steeped in wartime history – complete with its own underground bomb shelter – that hosted everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Jane Fonda.

Now, the 125-year-old landmark is being joined at the top by a new generation of high-end hotels amid Vietnam’s push to attract wealthier travellers and propel its double-digit growth ambitions.

“Vietnam has become one of the hottest markets, with Japan,” Maud Bailly, the chief executive of Sofitel Legend, Sofitel, MGallery & Emblems, said.

“After Covid, we noticed tourism in Asia has become more intra-regional. We had some question marks about Chinese travellers coming back, but in fact the region’s so resilient it’s booming in itself.”

In recent months, a Fairmont, The Theodore and Shilla Monogram have all opened in the Vietnamese capital, while a Waldorf Astoria and The Leah Hanoi are on their way.

According to city authorities, Hanoi aims to add at least 10,000 four- or five-star hotel rooms across the city by 2030 – a huge amount considering there are about the same number of total hotel rooms at every price point now.

Sofitel Legend, Sofitel, MGallery and Emblems are four luxury brands in the Accor stable.

The French hospitality group operates 45 hotels in Vietnam, seven of them under Bailly’s division, making the country her second-largest market in Asia behind Thailand.

Bailly, in town last week for the launch of a Unesco heritage initiative, has 12 more Vietnam hotels in the pipeline.

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“Competition will inevitably become more intense as new hotels enter the market,” said Neil MacGregor, CEO at Savills Vietnam. The challenge for operators will be differentiation, rather than an immediate oversupply concern, he said.

The rapid expansion of high-end hotels comes as Hanoi undergoes its biggest overhaul in decades.

The US$2.5 trillion plan aims to transform large parts of the city but, at least temporarily, has turned huge swathes of it into a construction site, causing anxiety among residents.

The pace and scale of change is exacerbating social frictions over issues including land rights and cultural heritage.

Hanoi hopes to generate as much as 340 trillion dong (US$13.2 billion) in tourism revenue by 2030 as Vietnam vies with regional tourism powerhouse Thailand for a bigger share of traveller spending.

International visitor numbers to the country topped 17.7 million in the first nine months of 2026, up 14.5 per cent on the same period of 2025, government data show, with China and South Korea the biggest feeder markets.

Although Chinese tourists are pulling back on overseas trips in favour of destinations closer to home, Bailly said they are still getting on planes. “We were afraid of not having them at all,” she said.

The challenge with more visitors, however, is hosting them without sacrificing one of Vietnam’s biggest draws – its natural landscapes.

Already, rapid resort development and rising tourist numbers threaten to degrade its coastline, undermining the very attractions that drew people to destinations like Phu Quoc, Danang and Ha Long Bay in the first place.

“There are obviously pressures that need to be dealt with,” said Jonathan Baker, a Unesco representative to Vietnam. “Preserving Vietnamese identity and culture, that’s also a priority.”

At the Metropole, where a room used to cost as little as US$7 when it first opened in 1901, one corridor is lined with black-and-white photos and memorabilia depicting the role the hotel has played throughout the city’s turbulent past. Now, a night starts from roughly US$400, stretching to around US$6,300 for a suite.

Rather than threatening the Metropole’s position, Bailly sees the growing ranks of high-end hotels as helping establish Hanoi as a luxury destination.

“The more luxury inspirational properties the better,” she said. “I’m not that much afraid about competition.” BLOOMBERG