Hoi An Ancient Town

How the ticket actually works

The thing people get wrong is expecting a turnstile. Hoi An’s old town has no gate — you can walk every street, browse the tailors, eat at the riverside and photograph the lanterns without paying a dong. The 120,000-dong ticket (about £3.40) is for the heritage buildings only: it’s a strip of five tear-off coupons, and you spend them at five of the roughly twenty listed sights. Buy it in person at one of the official booths dotted around the edge of the pedestrian zone, and ignore the people who approach you outside offering “tickets” — the booths are obvious and staffed.

Pick your five deliberately, because that’s the whole game. The standouts are the Tan Ky and Phung Hung old merchant houses, one of the Chinese assembly halls (Phuc Kien is the grandest), the Japanese Covered Bridge — restored in 2024, so the timber looks newer than the postcards — and one of the small folklore or trade museums. Don’t burn a coupon on a sight you’re only mildly curious about; you’ll wish you’d saved it.

When to go, and is the ticket worth buying?

Go mid-morning to early afternoon to use your stubs, while the houses are open (roughly 08:00 to 17:30) and the streets are still bearable, then come back for dusk and after dark, when the silk lanterns light up and candle boats drift down the Thu Bon. They are two different towns. If your dates land on a full moon, the car-free Lantern Festival evening — when the old town runs on lantern light alone — is the one to aim for.

At £3.40 for five sights it’s barely a decision, and stepping inside a 200-year-old merchant house or a smoky congregation hall is what lifts the visit above a pretty shopping street. But if you genuinely only want to wander, eat and shoot the lanterns, skip the ticket — nobody will stop you. Pair the heritage half-day with a bike ride out to An Bang beach or a morning at My Son rather than trying to do everything in the old town at once.