Bill Bensley’s fishing-village-meets-colonial-villa resort on the Son Tra peninsula, tested for a day on a day-use pass, called Daycation. The format every man travelling in Vietnam should know about.
We were staying in Hoi An, an hour up the coast, and we wanted to see what an InterContinental Danang daycation actually looked like in practice. The Daycation is the resort’s day-use package. Lunch at Citron, the run of the pools, the beach, the funicular, until early evening. You don’t take a room. You take the day.
It’s the right format for this property, and it’s worth knowing about if you travel in this part of Vietnam. Bensley resorts are built to be looked at, which means they reward a guest who shows up to look. An overnight stay gives you a bed and a breakfast. A daycation gives you the architecture, the food, and the peninsula, without the slow fade that happens in any hotel room after you’ve unpacked.
The Drive Up
The drive from Hoi An takes about an hour and fifteen. You move through central Danang first, past the bridges, and out the other side of the city. The peninsula juts east from there. As the road starts to climb, Danang returns into view across the water. The whole skyline. The high-rises along the coast, the mountains behind them. The city shrinks the higher you go. Son Tra is a protected reserve. The road narrows. The jungle closes in on either side. After a certain point there are no houses and no shops. Just the climb, and at the top, the hotel.
Reception At The Summit
The reception is at the summit of the resort. Open on both sides, so the wind from the peninsula moves through it before it reaches you. The air is the first thing worth noticing. Most luxury hotels smell of something curated. Air freshener, a custom-blended candle, hand soap at the desk, the flowers they’ve arranged by the door. This one doesn’t. It just smells of the sea, because Bensley has not put a wall between you and the sea. That is the first design decision a guest encounters, and it sets the grammar for everything that follows.
Bensley’s Grammar
Then you go down. Four levels, named Heaven, Sky, Earth and Sea. Bill Bensley, the American designer behind the property since it opened in 2012, arranged them that way on purpose. Bensley is the most theatrical hotel designer working in Asia. His resorts are built like film sets. Coherent, legible, a single visual idea pursued to the edge of the plot. This one is a French colonial hill-station fantasy crossed with a Vietnamese fishing village, dropped into a protected jungle. Once you start looking, you see the grammar everywhere. The hand-fans above the Long Bar. The conical pods at Citron, shaped after the nón lá hats Vietnamese women wear in the rice fields. The boat-funicular that carries you between levels. Every element is an answer to the same question. What would this place look like if it were a film?
The Funicular And The Monkeys
The funicular is the first staged moment. It is shaped like a fishing boat, it takes 90 seconds, and it drops you at Sea level, where the rest of the day happens. On the way down you see the monkeys. Son Tra is one of the last places in Vietnam where red-shanked doucs still live in the wild, and they are one of the main reasons travellers come up the peninsula in the first place. The species is endangered. Most of what’s left of the global wild population lives on this peninsula. They are a kind of langur. Grey bodies, white forearms, and a band of deep reddish-brown fur running from the knee to the ankle, so that they look as though someone has dressed them in velvet trousers. They are supposed to be shy. They are supposed to be hard to find. At the InterContinental they are everywhere. Four of them were sitting in the trees a few metres from the funicular track on the way down, pulling leaves off the branches and chewing them slowly, without looking up. By the end of the day we’d seen them four or five more times around the grounds. They did not seem interested in us.
Sea Level: Pools, Beach, Long Bar
At Sea level there are two pools. The lower one sits where the funicular drops you, opposite Terra Mare, the resort’s Italian restaurant. It is partly shaded, the loungers wide and deep, the water cooler than the air. The other is above the Long Bar, up a spiral staircase, and has the better view. From the upper pool you can see the full stretch of beach below and, further out, the fishing boats sitting on the water like small dark commas. The beach itself is a compact curve of pale sand held between two rocky outcrops. The water was warm in the way Vietnamese water is warm in April. Not cold enough to shock. Not hot enough to feel tepid.
The Long Bar runs almost the full depth of the building. Huge hand-fans hang from the ceiling like props from a film about colonial Indochina. In the middle of the afternoon it is the coolest room at Sea level, the fans moving the air without really trying to, and the place a guest ends up returning to between pool and beach. A pool table is tucked into the far end, past the fans. That bar alone is one of the most styled rooms in any hotel in Vietnam.
Lunch At Citron And Spa Trade
Lunch was at Citron. The restaurant sits at Sky level, built into the hillside, open to the sea. Citron is best known for its terrace, where the dining spaces are arranged inside giant conical pods modelled after the nón lá. The pods are the image the property leads with in most of its marketing, and they are reserved for overnight guests. Daycation lunch is served in the indoor dining room. Worth knowing before you book. If the pods are the reason you are coming, come for a night.
The indoor room is a different proposition from the terrace and its own kind of good. Dark wood throughout, floor to ceiling, with the light coming in softly rather than flooding the space. The colour you notice most is yellow, and after that, green. Both are pulled from the same colonial-Indochina grammar the Long Bar runs on, and the room has the same quality of carefully arranged shade. Outside the windows, the peninsula and the water are there, but framed. You look through the room at the view rather than sitting inside it. The sun moves slowly enough that you notice it changing across the wood between courses. In the middle of the day in April, it was the cooler and quieter place to have lunch, and I was glad of it.
The Daycation package offers a choice worth flagging before we get to the food. Each guest on the ticket gets either a three-course lunch at Citron or a spa experience at Sea level. You pick, per person. My mum, who writes for MenStyleFashion as Gracie Opulanza and has reviewed more luxury properties than anyone else on the editorial team, traded her lunch for the spa. She booked the manicure, and the spa offered her the choice between a Hermès nail polish application and CND Shellac, which is the gel finish most serious hotel spas in Asia run as their signature service. She chose the shellac. Her appointment was at 13:30, half an hour after we sat down at Citron, and it took her just over two hours. The rest of us ate.
Family Culinary
Three of us at the table, then. My dad, my sister, and me.
My sister and I both started with the burrata. Cherry tomatoes, roasted tomatoes, a thick balsamic, a bit of rocket. Properly made, properly cold, properly plated, the cheese at the right temperature. It is the kind of dish that falls apart in the wrong kitchen and it didn’t fall apart here. My dad went for the shrimp and pomelo salad, which is where Citron started to show what it is actually good at. The seafood options at the property are genuinely long and genuinely considered, and that is the lesson to take out of lunch. This is a coastal resort and the kitchen knows it.
For the main course, my sister ordered the wagyu wok-fried noodles and I ordered the spaghetti bolognese. I had been in Vietnam for three months at that point and I wanted pasta. The bolognese was good. A real meat sauce, slow-cooked, not a tomato sauce with mince dropped in. But the portion was small in the way Western food in Asia is always small. You pay the Western price. You eat at a Vietnamese size. If you are the kind of man who orders pasta in Southeast Asia, know what you are signing up for. My sister’s wagyu noodles landed better. A bigger plate, properly seasoned, the beef handled with more confidence than the pasta had been. My dad, who had already committed to the lobster bisque as a second starter, took the grouper in clay pot for his main, which arrived still steaming and was the best thing that came out of the kitchen for our table. The grouper was firm, the sauce was dense and fragrant, and the whole dish was the argument for why, at a property like this one, the right move is to order from the sea.
Dessert made up for the bolognese. I had the chocolate mousse, with a quenelle of vanilla ice cream, slices of banana, a thin chocolate wafer, and a piece of edible gold leaf pressed into the chocolate. That last detail could have been silly. It wasn’t. My sister had the citrus cake, which was lighter and probably the smarter choice after a noodle main. The three-course package includes a non-alcoholic drink, which is a better detail than it sounds. We chose three mocktails between us, and they arrived properly made rather than dressed-up fruit juice. Between the three of us the kitchen had run through burrata, shrimp and pomelo, lobster bisque, wagyu noodles, grouper, bolognese, a chocolate dessert, a citrus one, and a round of mocktails that did not apologise for being non-alcoholic. The Daycation package earns its price at lunch alone, and for my mum at the spa, it earned it in a different currency entirely.
The service across the day was warm without being theatrical, which is harder to get right than the industry admits. The pool attendant remembered our names after hearing them once. A waiter at Citron noticed a drink that hadn’t landed well and brought an alternative without being asked. The barman at the Long Bar let us sit and do nothing for an hour after lunch, and the nothing was the point. Nothing performative. Just careful.
On Dressing For A Bensley Resort
On style, a note. This is a resort that rewards guests who dress for it. Linen, loafers without socks, a light cotton shirt that reads as thought-through. The setting is cinematic and the other guests are, broadly, not. You will see plenty of men in branded activewear and flip-flops, which is the uniform of the mid-range international traveller everywhere on earth. Don’t be one of them. A Bensley property is an invitation to get dressed properly. A navy linen shirt and a good pair of trousers will cost you nothing, and will meet the architecture on its own terms. The men I noticed at Citron who had dressed for the room, rather than for the flight, looked like they belonged in it. The ones who hadn’t, didn’t.
The Way Back
The funicular ride back up in the late afternoon is slower than the one going down, because you’re looking at the sea fall away behind you rather than rushing toward it. The monkeys were still where we’d seen them that morning, still eating leaves, still unbothered by the guests going past in a boat on a rail. We collected the car at the summit and drove back down the peninsula, through Danang, along the coast toward Hoi An, with the light thinning and the sea on our left the whole way.
Would I recommend the Daycation? Yes. For any man travelling between Hoi An and Danang who wants to understand why Bensley is one of the most serious resort designers alive, and who doesn’t want to pay a full room rate to find out. The daycation is the fastest and most honest way into this property. You get the view, the pools, the food, the beach, the funicular, the monkeys, and the architecture at its peak hours. You leave before the spell wears off.
Staying overnight would be a different piece. Different rooms. Different restaurants. A slower, more interior review. That one I’ll file another time.
