Fairmont Took More Than a Century to Reach Vietnam

Fairmont has opened in Vietnam for the first time. Fairmont Hanoi sits in the Old Quarter, a few minutes’ walk from Hoan Kiem Lake, and carries 241 rooms including thirty-eight Fairmont Gold rooms and twelve suites. For a brand whose identity is built on landmark city hotels — the Banff Springs, the Peace Hotel in Shanghai, the Savoy in London — arriving in Hanoi more than a century into its history says as much about where luxury capital is moving as it does about the brand itself.

The building is large for the Old Quarter, which is a district of narrow lots and tight frontages. It carries eight dining and drinking venues, a 38,000-square-foot wellness and fitness centre, and what the group describes as the largest pillarless ballroom in the quarter — a specification aimed squarely at the corporate and wedding business that drives occupancy in Hanoi outside the peak tourist months. Perkins Eastman and Aston Design handled the architecture and interiors, drawing on the city’s relationship with the Red River and on local ritual and spiritual motifs. The owner is GELEX Group; Accor operates it.

The opening fits a wider pattern in Vietnamese hospitality. International luxury groups spent the last decade concentrating on the coast — Da Nang, Phu Quoc, Nha Trang, Con Dao — because beach resorts were where the international leisure money was. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City were comparatively underserved at the top end, particularly for business travellers who wanted a full-service city hotel rather than a serviced apartment. That gap is closing quickly, and Fairmont is one of several brands arriving in the capital within a short span.

For travellers the useful point is location rather than brand. The Old Quarter is the part of Hanoi most people actually want to be in, and it has historically offered a choice between boutique properties of variable quality and large hotels a taxi ride away in the French Quarter or the western business districts. A 241-room international hotel inside the quarter itself is a genuinely new option, and the usual caveat applies to any hotel in its first months: service patterns take a season to settle, and opening rates are often the best ones a property ever publishes.

Sources: HOTELS Magazine, Luxury Travel Advisor