Minor Hotels will open its first city hotel in Vietnam — the 310-room Avani+ Hanoi, due in 2028 — as the group shifts from two decades of coastal resort concentration toward the country's commercial hubs.

Chief Development and Luxury Officer Omar Romero told Skift the strategy is deliberate: Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have matured into commercial and cultural centers, air connectivity has improved, and the domestic travel market has expanded sharply. Vietnam logged 137 million domestic tourist trips in 2025, up roughly 25% from 110 million a year earlier, according to the Vietnam National Authority of Tourism.

Avani+ Hanoi, announced in September, will sit inside Hinode City, a mixed-use development that includes a lifestyle mall and 1,099 residential and serviced apartments. The location pairs the hotel with long-stay inventory from day one — a fit with Minor's target mix of corporate travelers, meetings business, short-stay leisure guests, and long-stay residents.

Why leave the coast now?

Minor has spent more than twenty years building leisure-focused properties in destinations such as Hoi An, Mui Ne, and Quy Nhon. That footprint has kept the group out of Vietnam's fastest-growing demand segments: corporate travel, meetings, and domestic urban stays.

Romero framed the shift in structural terms. "We want a Vietnam network, not just beach resorts," he indicated, pointing to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City as markets the group now treats as priorities rather than afterthoughts. Vietnamese travelers, he said, are a very important part of the mix — a segment that barely registered when Minor's properties sat in resort towns served mainly by international flyers.

The demand case rests on three numbers and one supply gap:

• 137 million domestic trips in 2025, up from 110 million in 2024 — growth of about 25% in a single year.
• Better air connectivity into both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, widening the feeder markets that can reach either city year-round.
• South Korea and China as key international source markets, alongside Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe, and Australia.
• New hotel supply in Vietnam remains concentrated on the coast, according to Savills, with Da Nang and Phu Quoc leading the three-year pipeline — leaving city inventory growth comparatively constrained.

That supply gap is the commercial argument. If pipeline development keeps flowing to beach destinations, urban markets stay undersupplied relative to demand growth — supporting rate and occupancy for whoever gets there first.

What comes after Hanoi?

Romero said Minor is actively looking for more urban opportunities, with Ho Chi Minh City the priority, but named no specific projects. The group has not disclosed a target unit count for Vietnam or a timeline beyond the 2028 Hanoi opening.

The Avani+ brand positioning — upscale select-service with meetings capability — matches the segment economics of mixed-use urban sites, where a 310-room keys count and adjacent serviced apartments let one development serve transient, corporate, and extended-stay demand without duplicating overhead.

For competitors watching the same data, the signal is that Vietnam's urban hotel market is now large enough to pull international operators whose Vietnam exposure was previously resort-only. With domestic travel growing 25% a year and city pipelines thin, expect further announcements from global chains targeting Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City before Minor's first urban property even opens its doors in 2028.