Da Nang or Hoi An: which one should you actually sleep in?

This is the first real decision of the trip, and it gets made before anyone has seen either place — usually from a hotel booking site, on the basis of photographs. The two cities are 30 km apart, about 40 to 50 minutes in a car, and they are not variations on each other. They are different holidays.

The short version: Đà Nẵng is a city with a beach; Hội An is a town with an evening. Which one you should sleep in depends almost entirely on who you are travelling with.

The short answer

If you only have three or four nights and you came for the photograph you have already seen, stay in Hội An. That is the honest answer for most first-time visitors, and we say it knowing perfectly well that the Đà Nẵng airport transfer is the shorter and cheaper job for us.

Stay in Hoi An if…

• You want to walk out of your hotel and into the thing you came to see. The Old Town closes to cars and motorbikes for much of the day and all evening, which makes it one of the few places in Vietnam you can wander with a child's hand in yours and not think about traffic.
• The evening matters more than the day. Lanterns come on at dusk, the river fills with boats, and it is genuinely lovely for about two hours — you have to be sleeping nearby to get it more than once.
• You are having clothes made. Tailoring needs a fitting and a return visit; doing that from Đà Nẵng turns a 40-minute drive into the spine of your week.
• You want the countryside close. Rice fields, Trà Quế herb village, the water-coconut palms at Cẩm Thanh and the beach are all within fifteen minutes.

Stay in Da Nang if…

• You want a proper beach holiday. Mỹ Khê runs for kilometres, it is wide, it is patrolled in the main season, and the hotels behind it have the pools and kids' clubs that Hội An mostly does not.
• You are travelling with teenagers, or anyone who wants something to do after nine at night.
• You have an early flight. The airport is inside the city — 10 to 20 minutes — which is the difference between leaving your hotel at 04:00 and at 03:00.
• You are staying two weeks and want a city's worth of restaurants rather than a town's.
• Someone in the party needs a hospital, a large chemist, or a shopping centre with air conditioning. It is a city; it has all of those.

The split stay, and how to divide it

For a week or more, doing both is usually better than choosing. The pattern that works, and the order matters:

1. 01Hội An first, and give it the larger shareFour or five nights of a seven-night trip. You arrive tired from a long flight and Hội An is the gentler landing — smaller, quieter, walkable, and the jet lag suits an early morning in the Old Town.
2. 02Day trips outward from thereMỹ Sơn, Bà Nà Hills, Cù Lao Chàm and the Marble Mountains are all day trips from Hội An. None of them need you to move hotels.
3. 03Đà Nẵng for the last night or twoMove up the coast for the beach, a city dinner and the bridge — and wake up 15 minutes from the airport instead of 50. On a 6am flight that is an hour of sleep.
4. 04One car, one moveThe hotel change is a 40-minute drive with your bags in the boot. Do it in the middle of a day and stop at the Marble Mountains on the way; it is exactly on the route.

For Australian families specifically

Most Australians arrive on a non-stop from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide or Perth — around eleven and a half hours, landing at Đà Nẵng itself rather than connecting through Saigon. That shapes the first night more than anything else in this guide.

With small children, an hour in a car at the end of eleven in the air is a real consideration. Two ways to handle it, and neither is wrong: sleep the first night in Đà Nẵng and move to Hội An in the morning when everyone is human again, or push through the 40 minutes and wake up where you actually wanted to be. Families doing the mid-year break in June and July should also know they are arriving in the hottest fortnight of the year — a hotel pool stops being a luxury and becomes the middle of every day.

What it costs to be in the wrong one

Not much, which is the reassuring part. A private car between the two is around $35 — roughly A$49 — and takes 40 to 50 minutes, priced per car rather than per seat, so a family of five pays what a couple pays. Grab runs the same route for around 250,000–400,000 VND when you have working data and no luggage.

So a day out in the other city costs an hour and a half of driving and the price of two transfers. If you are choosing between them for a short trip, choose for the evenings — that is the part you cannot day-trip.