Trip report: Vietnam 2021 — the first Da Nang group back after the pandemic

Vietnam opened to international visitors in November 2021, and we were among the first operators running groups there. The six clients who went on the November Da Nang departure had originally been booked for early 2020.

What eighteen months of restricted play did to the Montgomerie Links: the course was in extraordinary condition. Reduced rounds — the club had been running limited local play only — had allowed the turf to recover completely from the wear patterns that develop at any heavily played resort course. The greens were as fast as any I'd putted on all year. The fairways were uniform and firm.

The group: three couples, all returning Dormie clients, two of whom had been to Da Nang with us in 2018 and 2019. The new couple — friends of one of the returning pairs — had been persuaded on the basis of a fifteen-minute conversation over dinner the previous Christmas. The husband had said: 'James, I've been to every golf destination in Europe. What would genuinely surprise me?' I'd said Vietnam without hesitating. He said: 'Book it.' Then the world closed.

When he stood on the 14th tee at Montgomerie Links and looked across to the South China Sea with the Marble Mountains behind him and the Danang Golf Club course in the middle distance, he turned to his wife and said the same thing every golfer says at that point: 'Why did it take us this long?'

The BRG Norman course on day three: slightly harder, slightly less scenic than the Montgomerie, but a genuinely challenging test that rounds out the Da Nang golf picture. The combination of all three courses — Montgomerie, Faldo (now rebranded under BRG), and Norman — within 25 minutes of each other remains, in my view, the most concentrated quality in short-haul Asia golf travel.

We came back from that trip and started building the 2022 Vietnam programme immediately. Six became twelve became eighteen in the subsequent bookings. Da Nang is now consistently one of our top-three enquired destinations.