Hoiana Shores Golf Course: A Course That Requires Patience, But Definitely Offers Excellent Rewards

Gunnar Kobin

Mar 24

5 min read

Updated: Oct 22

Robert Trent Jones Jr. said he would kill for a site like Hoiana Shores. Normally that kind of line is just marketing. Then you stand on the 16th tee looking out at the East Sea and you start to think he meant it.

For me Hoiana Shores sits alongside The Bluffs at Ho Tram as the links golf of Vietnam. It was also, without any doubt, the best-conditioned course I played on the trip.

Getting there is simple. It is a 45-minute drive from Danang, and close enough to Hoi An that if you time it right you can play and still have the evening in the old town. The course is part of a huge resort complex with hotels, beaches and the whole operation, but you never feel crowded on the golf course. The clubhouse makes a strong first impression, and then you get on with what you came for.

A bit of history. The course is a Robert Trent Jones Jr. design, and the quote above is his. The site is the reason he said it: coastal land looking out over the East Sea to the Cham Islands.

OK, the actual golf.

Picture a links course on the west coast of Ireland. Now move it to Vietnam. Same wind, but a tropical oven instead of grey cloud. That is Hoiana Shores. The turf is very firm underfoot. The greens bounce and release rather than hold, and anything flown at the flag ends up well past it. In most of the world the ground game is one option among several. Here, on a lot of holes, it is the only option.

The sandy waste areas are wide and open and give the place an almost desert version of the Irish west coast. Then the wind comes off the water and reminds you where you are. It does not feel engineered. It feels as if someone pulled the vegetation off a links course that had been buried there for a long time.

Off the tee you have plenty of room. The greens are another matter. Large, raised, with subtle slopes and tricky undulations, and they will break a lot of hearts. Hitting the green is an achievement in itself. Miss it and the chip or pitch back is onto a surface that does not forgive much. Every hole tests your short game.

The conditioning was the best I saw on the trip. The fairways were perfect and the greens were fast and true. When a course is this well prepared, every shot gets what it deserves. Hit a bad one and you cannot blame the greenkeeper.

What I noticed most is that the course tells a story, and unlike most courses in Vietnam, it is a good one. It builds towards something and then delivers it.

The front nine is just fun golf. It is links-style, but it feels like an inland course. My front nine was 44, which mostly came down to two par 5s. I made 7 on the 3rd and 7 again on the 7th, both on holes where the fairway gives you all the room you could want. The width tempts you into thinking the holes are simple. They are not.

Heading into the back nine you get a first look at the ocean, and then it is gone again as the course takes you back inland. There are several good holes in this stretch. If you have played Hoiana before, you will probably catch yourself wishing you could skip ahead to the holes you know are coming. I dropped a 5 on the par-3 12th somewhere in there.

Then 15, 16 and 17, all on the ocean. Each one is a real test of club selection, with the East Sea and the Cham Islands sitting on the horizon. I played a lot of very good courses in Vietnam, and these three are among the best holes I saw. A large part of that is how the whole round has built up to them.

My scores on those three tell the story of the course quite well. A par on the 15th. A birdie on the 16th, the hole from the opening paragraph. Then a 6 on the 17th, a par 4, which is the course reminding me who is in charge. I finished with a birdie on the par-5 18th for a back nine of 38 and 82 in total. A birdie and a double in the space of two holes is about as honest a summary of Hoiana as I can give.

The structure reminded me of Pärnu Bay Golf Links at home in Estonia, where the designer Lassi Pekka Tilander also gives you a run of inland holes before the coastal holes that justify the whole round. Until the sea opens up, every hole feels like it might be the main event. With the thought that has gone into the routing here, the round becomes a story rather than just 18 holes.

What you should know before you play. The design is built around rewarding good decisions. The wide fairways make it look like a simple, aim-anywhere course, and it is far from that. The angles into the greens, the prevailing wind and the shape of the greens all punish you if you are on the wrong side of the fairway.

Do not fire long irons or hybrids at flags on the raised front edges of the greens. It is not a smart play. The players who use the ground game will generally score better than the ones who ignore it.

The clubhouse is excellent. It is the kind of place that does not just create an image but actually builds a brand. The locker rooms are spacious and well designed, and the lounge is somewhere you want to sit and have a drink after the round instead of heading straight for the car. Arrival, bag drop and check-in run as smoothly as any other course in the area would like them to. Someone here has an eye for detail. Nothing was done half-heartedly.

Should you play it? Yes. If you are planning a Vietnam golf trip, Hoiana and The Bluffs are the two benchmarks to plan around. They are not really rivals. The Bluffs is the more physical and more isolated of the two, up in its dunes. Hoiana is better conditioned, smarter in its routing, and above all a better experience from the moment you arrive to the moment you walk off the 18th. It has set the standard for the other courses on Vietnam's central coast.

Final word. Know what is coming on 15, 16 and 17. Do not rush the round and let the build-up work for you. Trust your approach shots and the ground game rather than fighting them. Hoiana Shores is the best course in central Vietnam: a clever design on a great coastal site, with the clubhouse and the surroundings to match.