How many days in Hoi An is ideal for first timers?

My answer has been the same for years, which is three nights. Not because there’s some perfect amount of sightseeing that fills exactly three days, but because of when the town is nice, which is early in the morning and again after about eight in the evening. In between it fills up with day trippers from Da Nang and the streets get genuinely hard to walk down.

So the whole trick with Hoi An is being asleep in it, which sounds like an odd thing to say about a holiday but there it is.

Two nights is fine and lots of people do it happily. Four or five make sense if you want beach days or you’re getting something made by a tailor.

And I’d talk you out of the Da Nang day trip, which I know a lot of people are planning because the hotels there are cheaper and it’s only half an hour up the road.

• Quick Answer: Three nights is the answer to how many days in Hoi An most first timers need. That gives you two full days plus the evening you arrive and the morning you leave, which covers the Ancient Town, An Bang beach, a bike ride out to the rice paddies and one day trip. Two nights works if you drop the day trip. Four or five if the beach matters or you’re having clothes made.
• What Each Length Covers:
  • 1 night: the Ancient Town in the evening and again early. Nothing outside it.
  • 2 nights: the town, plus either the beach or the countryside. No day trip.
  • 3 nights: town, beach, countryside, one day trip. What I book.
  • 4-5 nights: beach days, tailoring with proper fittings, or both day trips.
  • A week: only if you stop sightseeing and settle in somewhere.
• Things That Push the Number Up:
  • Tailoring. Two clear days in town for fittings, so three nights minimum.
  • October and November. It floods most years, so keep a spare night.
  • An early departure flight. Leaving at dawn deletes your last morning entirely.
• With Da Nang: 5 nights splits well as 3 and 2. On 4 nights I’d do 3 and 1.
• With Hue: two nights there, three hours away over the Hai Van pass.

You’ll notice I’ve linked to a few hotels and activities I used or recommend, you can even highlight any text to check prices and book instantly. If you make a booking through them, I receive a small commission, which really helps support the work I do here, at no additional cost to you.

The Bit of Arithmetic Everyone Gets Wrong

Your first day is not really a day, and that’s true of most trips but it bites harder here.

You land at Da Nang, you queue for a bit, you find your driver, you’re in a car for forty-five minutes, you check in, you shower because you’ve been on a plane. By the time you’re out of the door it’s evening.

The last day is usually worse. If your flight is at lunchtime you get a morning out of it. If it’s at seven in the morning you get nothing, because you’ll be leaving Hoi An around five.

Which means the thing sold to you as three days in Hoi An is quite often one full day with two halves stuck on either end.

Anywhere else that would be a minor annoyance. Here it matters, because those two halves are an evening and a morning, and evenings and mornings are exactly when this town is at its best.

If you plan around daytimes you end up spending your good hours in transit and your bad hours in a crowd.

So I’d count nights when you’re booking. Three nights means three evenings, three mornings and two whole days in the middle of it.

One Night

One night gets you an evening and a morning, and that really is enough to see the Ancient Town, because the Ancient Town is small. You could walk every street in it in an hour if you were being brisk about it.

What one night doesn’t get you is anything outside the old town. No An Bang, no cycling, no day trip. You’ll also be checking in and checking out on consecutive days, which eats an hour at each end, and you’ll be dragging a bag around on one of them.

I’d still rather have one night here than a day trip. It isn’t close. The day trip puts you in Hoi An from about eleven until five, which is the block of hours when there are the most people and the least atmosphere, and then drives you back to Da Nang before the lanterns come on properly.

Two Nights

Two evenings, two mornings, one full day in the middle. That’s a real trip and I’ve had good ones on it.

The way it usually goes is: arrive, dinner somewhere near the hotel, walk through the lanterns. Next morning up early for the old town, back to the hotel when it gets hot, then out to An Bang for the late afternoon and dinner at the beach. Last morning, bike ride out through the rice fields towards Tra Que, which takes about two hours including stopping, and then you leave.

That covers the four things I’d say Hoi An actually is. Old town, beach, countryside, food.

What falls off is the day trip. My Son and the Cham Islands both take an entire day and there isn’t a spare one to give them. Tailoring is also difficult on two nights, though people try.

One small thing that helps: don’t decide in advance what your full day is for. Look at the forecast the night you arrive. Clear day, go to the beach. Grey day, do the town and the bike ride, both of which are perfectly nice in drizzle.

Three Nights, Which Is What I Book

Two full days, three evenings, three mornings. Here’s roughly how I’d lay it out, though obviously swap things around if the weather does something.

• The evening you arrive. Dinner near wherever you’re sleeping and a wander. Don’t book anything. You’ll be tired and the old town is nicer when you’ve got no plan in it.
• Day one. Ancient Town before nine. Coffee somewhere on Tran Phu while the shutters are going up. Back to the hotel through the middle of the day, because it’s hot and the streets are full. Out to An Bang for the late afternoon, stay for dinner.
• Day two. The day trip. My Son if you’re into ruins, and go early, the difference between the first tour and the ten o’clock buses is enormous. Cham Islands instead if you’d rather be in the water, though the boats only run from roughly March to August so check before you plan around it.
• The last morning. The bike ride out to Tra Que and the paddies. Twenty minutes out of town and you’re among buffalo. This is my favourite thing to do here and it costs nothing because your hotel almost certainly lends bikes.

That leaves an evening spare if the weather takes one off you, which in the wet months it might. What else you could put in those slots is in the activities in Hoi An pillar.

Three nights is also the point where it starts making sense to stay outside the old town. On two nights I’d stay central because you can’t afford to lose time getting anywhere. On three I’d take a room in the ring just outside and save twenty or thirty per cent, which I’ve gone into properly in where to stay in Hoi An.

Four or Five Nights

Three reasons to add nights, and if none of them apply I’d spend the time in Hue or Da Nang instead.

The first is the beach. An Bang is four kilometres east and once you’re out there you tend to stay, so it becomes a whole day instead of an afternoon. If you want two proper beach days plus the town you’re at five nights, and you should sleep at the beach for at least part of it.

The second is tailoring, which I’ll come to separately because it has its own timetable.

The third is wanting both day trips. My Son is inland and the Cham Islands are out to sea and they’re in opposite directions, so doing them back to back is a long two days. Put a normal day between them and you’re at five.

Beyond five nights the town does start to thin out, unless you’ve got a reason to be here beyond seeing things. Which brings me to the next bit.

A Week or More

This works, but only if you change what you’re doing. Stop sightseeing, base yourself out at An Bang, rent a bike by the week, find a café you like, and go into the old town maybe twice.

There’s a decent long-stay foreign community around the beach and quite a lot of people working remotely from it.

As a sightseeing week it doesn’t work at all. I stayed a week here once and had run out of things by about Wednesday, which was entirely my own fault for spending the whole time in the old town, but it did teach me how small this place actually is.

Nobody should tell you there’s a week of attractions in Hoi An, because there isn’t.

If You’re Having Clothes Made, Add a Night

This one quietly decides trip length for a lot of people and hardly any of the day-count articles mention it.

The process is that you go in, they measure you and you pick fabric, and then you come back the next day for a fitting.

If something needs taking in or letting out, that’s another visit the day after. So you need two clear days in town, minimum, and the day you arrive doesn’t count because you’ll get there in the evening.

Shops will absolutely tell you they can do it in 24 hours, and they can, and I’ve seen what comes out of that.

One rushed fitting is how people end up with a jacket they never wear. So three nights is the floor if you want anything made and four is more comfortable. Whatever you do, don’t order the day before you fly out.

Which shops and how the whole thing works is in the Hoi An tailors guide.

How Many Days in Hoi An and Da Nang Together

Most people planning this are really planning both, so here’s how I’d split it.

They’re different places doing different jobs. Da Nang is a proper city with a very long beach, the Marble Mountains, Son Tra peninsula and somewhere to go after eleven at night. Hoi An is small and old and shut to traffic for a lot of the day.

The mistake I see constantly is people booking Da Nang for the whole trip and treating Hoi An as an outing, because the hotels are cheaper and the airport is right there and it saves moving. It’s an understandable decision and it costs you both of the good windows here.

If you’re only going to base yourself in one of the two, base in Hoi An and do Da Nang as the day out, since Da Nang is perfectly pleasant at midday and Hoi An really isn’t.

Getting There, Because It Eats Into the Days

Hoi An hasn’t got an airport. You fly into Da Nang and then it’s about forty-five minutes by road, somewhere around 350,000 to 450,000 VND in a taxi, a bit less on Grab, and roughly the same if you book a transfer through your hotel. There’s a public bus as well which is very cheap and quite slow and drops you at the edge of town.

From Hue it’s three hours by car over the Hai Van pass. You can also take the train to Da Nang and transfer, which takes longer and is a much nicer ride.

The thing worth planning around is your flight home. A dawn departure means leaving Hoi An in the dark and losing your last morning, which on a three-night trip is a real chunk of the holiday. If you can pay a bit more for a later flight, do.

Adding Hue

Two nights is right. The citadel takes half a day, the royal tombs take another half, and there’s good food to eat in between. You can do it in one night and you’ll be rushing the tombs, which are the better half.

On a week in central Vietnam I’d go 3 nights Hoi An, 2 Hue, 2 Da Nang, in whichever order the flights make cheap.

If you have to drop one of the three, drop Da Nang, because you’ll be passing through it anyway and can see a bit of it on the way.

With Children, Add a Night

Everything just takes longer, the heat in the afternoon is harder on small children than on adults, and the old town during the crowded hours is where family days tend to come apart.

Four nights with two slow ones in the middle is a completely different holiday from three nights of trying to fit things in.

The activities that work well here are the basket boats over at Cam Thanh, the lantern-making workshops, and swimming at An Bang, and none of those are quick things. I’d also stay at the beach or in the ring around town, not in the middle of it.

October and November, Keep a Spare Night

The flood months are the one time I’d deliberately build in slack.

Hoi An floods most years, and in a bad one the water cuts the roads out to the beach and sometimes to the airport for a day or two.

If you’ve got three nights and one of them goes underwater you’ve lost a third of your trip. With four it’s an inconvenience and you carry on.

Book somewhere you can cancel, keep the day trip loose, and don’t put anything unmissable on your last day. There’s a month-by-month rundown in the best time to visit Hoi An guide.

So What Do You Book?

Three nights for a first visit. Two if you’re short on time and happy to skip the day trip. Four or five if the beach or a tailor is part of why you’re coming.

And book by nights instead of days, because the evening you arrive and the morning you leave are both worth having, and both of them vanish if you plan the trip around daytimes.

….

Right, the bit where I’d like to hear from you.

Three nights is my answer and it comes out of how I like to travel, which is with a spare evening and nothing much in the diary. Someone who plans harder than me could probably do the lot in two and be perfectly happy.

So if you did Hoi An in two nights and it felt like enough, I’d like to know how you ordered it. And if you booked five and thought it dragged, tell me what you ran out of first, because that’s the thing I’d want to warn people about and I’ve never had that problem myself.

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