41 “From a tourist standpoint, Vietnam has the potential to be a hub for southeast Asia,” says Adam Calver of Faldo Design, who moved to the country in 2017 to run the course at Laguna Lang Co, which was designed by the Faldo firm and opened in 2013. “It has diversity in terrain – as well as the coastal stuff there could be great mountain golf. But in recent years, the balance of play has changed. At Laguna, Covid tripled our domestic golf demand – we went from ten per cent Vietnamese golfers to 30 or 40 per cent. Covid saw players start to bring their families to the golf course in numbers, and junior golf has started to grow a lot. The Vietnam Golf Association has launched a junior golf tour in partnership with the R&A, and the Faldo Series final has been here since 2017. There are a lot of very good Vietnamese juniors now. The growth of golf among the Vietnamese goes hand in hand with the overall economic growth of the country.” Mike Gorman of Robert Trent Jones II, who was the lead architect on the firm’s Hoiana Shores project near the city of Da Nang, about halfway down the Vietnamese coast, echoes the same message. “The original market for Hoiana was tourists, principally Korean and Japanese,” he says. “However, what has happened is that it is such a fast-developing country that there has been a local golf boom among the Vietnamese. But the tourist market is still strong. Every time I land in the Da Nang airport there could be 20, 30 or 40 golf bags being unloaded off the plane.” Curley says: “Every course in the Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City areas is rammed full of locals, to the tune of about 200 rounds a day. You hardly see any expats playing.” As a result, there are substantial numbers of courses in development, though exactly how many depends on who you talk to. “There are 65-70 courses operational in the country now, with perhaps a dozen in active construction,” says Calver. “We hear that there are a hundred courses in planning, but I don’t believe that is realistic,” says Gorman. But there is no doubt that, as elsewhere in Asia, developers are building for the future and accepting that, in the early days, their courses may lose money. “Everything in Asia is built ahead of the curve,” says Curley. “Construction costs are comparable with the rest of the world, they might be threequarters of what you would spend everywhere else, but operations are extremely cheap. If you’re ahead of the curve at some resort in Vietnam, and it is going to take five years before you have enough golfers, you aren’t losing that much money. It is cheap to maintain a golf course there, because labour is cheap, so you can wait. Photo: Gary Lisbon When the RTJ II-designed Hoiana Shores course opened in 2019, it was immediately recognised as one of the region’s best
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