Zannier Hotels Bãi San Hô Opens on Vietnam’s Phu Yen Coast
The Belgian group opened a 71-villa resort on 1 December 2020 on a private bay in Phu Yen, with villas modelled on the houses of fishermen and highland peoples.
Zannier Hotels Bãi San Hô opened on 1 December 2020 in Phu Yen, a province of central Vietnam between Quy Nhon and Nha Trang that had until then seen almost no international tourism. The resort has 71 villas, each with its own pool, on a site of 98 hectares around a private bay with a kilometre of beach and a coral reef. Its name means bay of corals.
Zannier Hotels is a small Belgian-owned group founded by Arnaud Zannier, whose approach he describes as mastered simplicity: hotels that take their form from the buildings and way of life of the place where they stand. In Phu Yen the land is a mixture of rice paddies, hills and shore, and the villas follow it in three types.
The Paddy Field Villas stand on stilts above working rice fields, and are modelled on the long, thatched houses of the highland peoples of central Vietnam. The Hill Pool Villas, on the slopes, take their steep roofs and timber frames from the communal houses of the Bahnar. The Beach Pool Villas, low and thick-walled, are derived from the houses of the fishing communities of the coast. All are built of local materials and furnished with antiques and objects found in the region. The rice fields are farmed, and herbs and vegetables are grown for the kitchens.
There are three restaurants. Bà Hai serves the cooking of the region in a building like a village house, Nhà Ở offers Southeast Asian dishes, and Làng Chài, on the beach, grills seafood. The Hoa Sen spa uses Vietnamese therapies.
The resort is about an hour’s drive from the airports of Tuy Hoa and Quy Nhon, both served by flights from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Quy Nhon is also the midpoint of The Vietage, the luxury rail carriage that links it with Da Nang and Nha Trang.
The opening was a bet on a coast of fishing villages, lagoons and empty beaches that most visitors to Vietnam had never heard of, and it has done much to put Phu Yen on the map. It belongs to a small group of Vietnamese resorts defined by their setting and design, with Amanoi to the south and Four Seasons The Nam Hai to the north.