Vietnam’s Record 2026: More Visitors, Busier Ha Giang Roads

While Thailand counts a small drop in visitors, Vietnam is having the best year in its history. Almost sixteen million international arrivals in eight months, a target of twenty-five million for 2026, and European visitors pouring in. Here is what is driving the boom, what it feels like on the mountain roads of the north, and how to ride Vietnam this season without spending half of it in a queue for a photo.

The numbers, and why they matter

Between January and August 2026, Vietnam welcomed nearly sixteen million international visitors, about fourteen percent more than in the same months of last year. August alone brought close to two million, up more than eighteen percent. The official target for the year is twenty-five million, and by the end of August the country had already reached almost two thirds of it, with the busy autumn season still to come.

Put that next to Thailand, where arrivals are down about three percent this year, and you see a region where the balance is shifting. Thailand still receives more visitors overall, but the gap is closing fast. Curiously, both countries welcomed roughly the same number of Chinese visitors in the first eight months of the year, about three and a half million each. The difference is that Vietnam is also growing strongly in almost every other market, while Thailand is not.

Who is coming

Asia still dominates. Around three quarters of Vietnam’s visitors come from the region, led by China and South Korea, which together make up almost forty percent of the total. The fastest-growing group, though, is European. Arrivals from Europe rose by more than half in the first seven months of the year, to well over two and a half million by the end of August.

A big part of that surge is Russia, which has more than doubled and sent over a million visitors by the end of August, helped by restored direct flights. But the growth is broad. Poland was up by more than half in the first seven months, the Czech Republic by almost thirty percent, Sweden and Switzerland by more than twenty. Vietnamese tourism officials like European visitors for a simple reason: they tend to stay longer and spend more than most short-haul travellers, and they travel beyond the beaches.

The visa that did the heavy lifting

The single biggest reason for the European boom is paperwork, or rather the lack of it. In March 2025 Vietnam extended a forty-five-day visa exemption for citizens of twelve countries, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, valid until March 2028. In August 2025 it added twelve more: Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Switzerland, valid until August 2028. For everyone else, an electronic visa allows stays of up to ninety days.

The contrast with Thailand this year is hard to miss. In September, Thailand cut its visa-free stay for most Western passports from sixty days to thirty. Vietnam, meanwhile, lets a rider from Amsterdam or Warsaw stay forty-five days with nothing but a passport, and anyone else ninety days with an online visa. For long-stay travellers and riders who want to combine a tour with a few weeks of wandering, that is a real consideration, and the numbers suggest people have noticed.

What a record year feels like on the ground

Numbers are one thing. What riders want to know is whether the roads are crowded. The honest answer is: the famous places are busier, the roads mostly are not. Hoi An’s old town at sunset, the rice terraces around Sapa, the boat trips in Ha Long Bay and the viewpoints of the Ha Giang loop all feel the boom. The long stretches of mountain road between those places are still mostly used by local traffic, trucks, buses and farmers on small motorbikes.

The north is where riders feel it most, because the Ha Giang loop has become a victim of its own fame. In the buckwheat flower season, from late October into November, the small towns of Dong Van, Meo Vac and Yen Minh fill with backpackers on rented scooters and groups riding pillion behind local easy riders. The Ma Pi Leng pass, one of the most spectacular roads in Asia, can have a queue of people at every photo stop by mid-morning.

The Ha Giang effect

It is worth being clear-eyed about why that matters. Crowds on a mountain pass are not only an aesthetic problem. Many of the riders on the loop are inexperienced, riding bikes they are not licensed to ride, on roads with steep drops and heavy trucks. For every crash video that goes viral, plenty more never make it onto social media. More people means more of those situations, more tired riders at the end of the day, and more scooters stopped in the middle of the road for a selfie on a blind corner.

The authorities are responding elsewhere in the country. This year, police around Nha Trang and in other tourist provinces have been stopping foreign riders without valid licences, and rental businesses are being pushed to check paperwork. That will probably reduce the number of completely unqualified riders over time, but it will not empty the loop. The fame is here to stay.

How to ride the north without the crowd

The good news is that the north of Vietnam is enormous, and most visitors stick to a very small part of it. The same karst plateau that makes Ha Giang famous continues into areas that see a fraction of the traffic. The terraced valleys of Hoang Su Phi, west of Ha Giang town, are as beautiful as anything on the main loop and far quieter. The north-west, from Tu Le over the Khau Pha pass to Mu Cang Chai, then through the Muong Than valley and up to the O Quy Ho pass, is long, high and gloriously empty on weekdays. Cao Bang in the north-east, with the Ban Gioc waterfall on the Chinese border, has its own loop that most backpackers never reach.

Timing helps as much as routing. Ride the famous passes early in the morning, before the minibuses and scooter groups leave their guesthouses. Avoid weekends at the most popular viewpoints, when domestic tourists from Hanoi join the international crowd. And plan overnight stops in the smaller towns rather than the backpacker hubs, where the homestays are quieter and the food is often better.

Where the pressure shows: beds

The part of the boom that affects a riding holiday most directly is accommodation. Mountain towns in the far north have a limited number of hotels that are comfortable, clean and able to handle a group of riders with bikes that need secure parking. In peak weeks, those rooms go early. Riders who turn up in Dong Van in early November without a booking can end up in a room above a karaoke bar, or riding on to the next town after dark, which is exactly what you do not want to do on those roads.

For independent riders, the advice is simple: book the nights in the small mountain towns first, well ahead, and keep flexibility for the bigger towns where there is more choice. On a guided ride, that is the organiser’s job, and one of the least visible but most useful things a local team does. A quiet hotel with a locked courtyard in the busiest week of the year is much easier to find with a phone call in Vietnamese than on a booking website the week before.

A quieter week in the north, in outline

To make that concrete for riders planning their own route, here is the kind of shape a crowd-dodging week in the north can take. Leave Hanoi early on a weekday and ride west, crossing the Khau Pha pass in the afternoon light before dropping to the terraces of Mu Cang Chai, and sleep in the valley rather than in the busiest homestay cluster. The next morning, drop into the Muong Than valley and climb over O Quy Ho, then skirt the crowds of Sapa rather than staying in the middle of them. Head north-east through the markets of the border hills and on to Hoang Su Phi, where the terraces climb whole mountainsides and you may not see another foreigner all day.

Only then do you reach Ha Giang and the plateau, arriving from the side most people do not use and riding the famous passes early, before the scooter groups have finished breakfast. The scenery is the same world-class scenery everyone came for. The difference is that you get to enjoy it with space around you, and that you have spent the previous days on roads that are, if anything, even better. It is not a secret route. It is simply the one most visitors never have time to plan.

What the boom means for the people who live up there

For the Hmong, Dao, Tay and other communities of the far north, the tourist boom is a mixed blessing. Homestays, small restaurants and guiding have brought real income into villages where farming alone paid very little, and many families have used it to send children to school, fix houses and buy vehicles. At the same time, some towns on the most famous loops have grown fast and without much planning, and the arrival of thousands of visitors in a few peak weeks puts pressure on water, waste and the patience of the people who live there.

Riders can help in simple ways. Stay in family-run places where you can, eat in local restaurants rather than the ones that cater only to backpackers, take your rubbish with you, ask before photographing people, and do not ride through villages at speed. A group that behaves like guests is remembered well, and the next group that comes through is welcomed the same way.

The operator’s view: book earlier than you think

For anyone organising a ride, the practical effect of a record year is that everything needs to be arranged earlier. Hotels in the small mountain towns in late October and November are the first thing to go. Flights into Hanoi at the start of the European autumn holidays are busier and pricier. And good local guides and mechanics, the people who make a ride in the north safe and enjoyable, are in demand across the whole industry.

That is not a sales trick, it is logistics. If you are thinking about a ride in northern Vietnam in the coming season, the useful thing to do is to decide early, even if the dates are a few months away. The peak season for European travellers in Vietnam runs from late September through the end of the year, which happens to be exactly when the mountains of the north are at their best.

Is Vietnam getting expensive?

Not in the way Thailand has. The Vietnamese dong has not strengthened the way the baht did in 2025, and everyday costs, food, fuel and simple hotels, remain very good value by any European standard. A bowl of pho at a roadside stall is still one of the great bargains of world travel. What has gone up is the price of the things everybody wants at the same time: the best-located hotels in peak weeks, the boat trips on the most famous bays, and the domestic flights around the major holidays.

For a riding trip, the cost structure is the same as it always was. The biggest single item is the flight from home, followed by the bike, the accommodation and the logistics. In a boom year, the logistics are where experience saves the most money, because the costly mistakes are the ones made in a hurry: a last-minute hotel, a broken rental bike, a detour after dark.

The Vietnamese are travelling too

One more part of the picture is easy to miss. Vietnam’s own middle class is travelling inside the country in record numbers, and on long weekends and national holidays the mountain roads fill with domestic visitors from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, in cars, on big bikes and in groups of friends on scooters. The national holidays around 2 September and the Lunar New Year in late January or February are the busiest times of all, and some of the most popular areas are best avoided on those dates.

The flip side is that Vietnam now has a growing big-bike culture of its own. It is common to meet Vietnamese riders on adventure bikes at the top of a pass, keen to talk about routes and machines. They are often the best source of up-to-date information about a road you have not ridden yet, and a reminder that the mountains of the north belong first to the people who live there.

Paperwork in a boom year

More visitors means more attention from the authorities, and the rules are being applied more strictly than in the past. For riders, the most important one is the licence: Vietnam only recognises international driving permits issued under the 1968 Vienna Convention, together with your home licence showing the motorcycle category. Check which convention your permit is issued under before you travel, because permits issued under the older 1949 convention are not valid here. Riding without valid paperwork also puts your travel insurance in doubt.

If your passport is not on the visa-free list, apply for the electronic visa through the official government portal rather than through one of the many lookalike websites that charge several times the official fee for the same document. The official e-visa is valid for up to ninety days and can be single or multiple entry, which matters for riders planning to cross into Laos and come back. Give it a couple of weeks before your flight; it is usually quick, but a boom year is not the time to test how quick.

And one detail catches people who have not been to Vietnam since 2024: the country reorganised its provinces in 2025, merging many of them. Ha Giang is now part of Tuyen Quang province on the official map, even if every rider still calls it the Ha Giang loop. That matters when you read weather warnings or official notices about road closures.

Is it still worth it?

Without hesitation. A record year for tourism does not change the fact that northern Vietnam has some of the most dramatic mountain riding in the world. The karst peaks of the Dong Van plateau, the terraces of Mu Cang Chai at harvest time, the long climb to the O Quy Ho pass with Fansipan in the clouds above you: none of that is diminished by a few more people at the viewpoints. It just rewards a little more planning and a willingness to go where the minibuses do not.

If anything, the boom is a sign that the rest of the world has noticed what riders have known for years. The trick now is to enjoy it before the next wave of infrastructure turns some of the wilder roads into ordinary highways. Several expressways are being built in the north, and a road that takes a day now may take two hours in a few years. That will be good for the people who live there, and a little sad for everybody who loves the long way round.

Riding Vietnam for real

The 10-day Northern Vietnam ride starts and ends in Hanoi and loops through the far north: Ba Be lake, Meo Vac and Dong Van on the karst plateau, Ha Giang, Bac Ha, a rest day in Sapa, the terraces of Mu Cang Chai, Phu Yen and Mai Chau, with a tour leader on a motorcycle, a mechanic and a support car. The 20-day Vietnam, Laos and Thailand ride links the north of Vietnam with its neighbours, and the 30-day Great Indochina Ride is for riders who want the whole region in one go. Each is a guided tour designed around the calendar and the crowds, not in spite of them.

Thinking about the coming season? Ask us on WhatsApp or at info@bigbiketours.com which weeks still have space. In a record year, a motorcycle tour in the north is best booked early, and a big biking tour with a local team is the easiest way to get the hotels, the roads and the right motorbike tour for your dates without spending your evenings on booking sites.