Two Markets in One Boom: Reading a Tourism Surge Before You Commit Capital
A tourism market that roughly doubles its revenue in a single year tends to read as permission. For anyone holding or financing an asset on the island, growth at that pace looks like proof of demand, and proof of demand looks like room to raise rates and hold a premium. The logic is tempting, yet in Phu Quoc's case it is also incomplete. The figure that travels through the trade press flattens a market that has been pulling apart underneath, and the part of that market an asset is exposed to now matters more than the headline rate of growth.
What Phu Quoc's 2025 numbers say
Begin with the numbers that get quoted. Across 2025 the island drew an estimated 8.1 million visitors and roughly 1.8 million international arrivals, generating close to 44 trillion VND in tourism revenue (Vietnam News Agency, 2025). Set those against 2024 - about 5.9 million visitors, 963,000 international, and 21.17 trillion VND in revenue (Vietnam News Agency, 2024) - and the shape of the year becomes clear. Total visitors rose by a little over a third. Revenue, meanwhile, very nearly doubled.
Those two rates cannot both describe the same underlying behaviour. A visitor count that grew around 37 percent while revenue climbed close to 108 percent means the composition of demand shifted far more than its volume did. Spend per visitor rose sharply, and a rise of that size is never evenly distributed; it concentrates in a particular kind of guest staying in a particular kind of product. For any property whose business case rested on the old mix, that recomposition is the development that matters, while the comfortable "record year" headline barely registers it.
The arithmetic makes the point plainly. If revenue grows at roughly three times the pace of arrivals, the average guest in 2025 was worth considerably more than the average guest in 2024 — but only somewhere on the island. A destination can post a record revenue line while the rooms-only operator down the beach sees very little of it.
(A note on geography for readers tracking the data: following Vietnam's 2025 provincial reorganisation, Phu Quoc is now administered as a special zone within An Giang province rather than the former Kien Giang, so recent figures are reported by the An Giang Department of Tourism. The island-level counts remain comparable year on year.)
Where the new demand is coming from
The direction of the shift shows up in the source markets and the channels that carry them. International arrivals nearly doubled over the year, and the new traffic is heavily weighted toward markets that travel on shorter notice and book through packages rather than direct: Russia and the CIS, China, Korea, and a fast-emerging India among them (Vietnam News Agency, 2025). The momentum is being engineered as much as it is organic - Russian and CIS charter programmes resumed for the 2025–2026 winter season, and the first direct New Delhi–Phu Quoc service launched in December 2025 (Vietnam News Agency, 2025). A 30-day visa-free pilot for all international visitors has lowered the barrier further (An Giang Province Portal, 2026).
That volume is genuine. It is also demand of a particular kind, and inventory designed for a different kind cannot assume it will convert. Demand that arrives through tour operators and online travel agencies carries higher distribution costs and weaker rate control than demand a property books directly, which compresses the margin on every room even when occupancy looks healthy. A resort that wins this traffic can fill its calendar and still watch its yield slip, because the guest is paying a packaged rate negotiated upstream rather than the published one. For a five-star asset, that is the quiet way a premium position erodes: not through empty rooms, but through full ones sold on someone else's terms.
One destination, two trajectories
At the same time, the premium end of the market is getting stronger, and that is what makes the situation genuinely two-sided. A market that was only commoditising would at least be legible, since every asset would face the same downward pressure and could respond in the same direction. A market splitting in two is harder to manage, because the right move at one end is the wrong move at the other, and destination-level data gives no signal as to which end a given property occupies.
Evidence for that upper layer sits in the gap between revenue and volume, and in the supply now arriving to capture it. Operators including JW Marriott, The Luxury Collection and a Ritz-Carlton Reserve already anchor the island's high end, and Sun Group's Rixos Phu Quoc - Southeast Asia's first all-inclusive resort, with more than 1,300 rooms on Hon Thom - opens its first phase in mid-2026 (Ennismore, 2025). Inventory of that calibre captures a high-yield guest the mass-market charter traffic never reaches. So the island is now running two races at once: a high-yield luxury layer deepening on the back of new premium supply, and a high-volume mass layer expanding beneath it. The single headline arrivals figure averages the two into a number that describes neither.
The all-inclusive model sharpens the divide. A program-based property collects a guest's dining, activities and spa spend on its own books rather than ceding it to the night markets and attractions beyond the gate, so a market-wide revenue figure can climb on the strength of a handful of assets while the rooms-only operators around them capture far less of it. When revenue doubles and volume rises a third, the gap is not abstract - it is the spend those programmed properties are pulling onto their own balance sheets.
The pattern is holding into 2026
This is not a one-year artefact. Through the first four months of 2026 Phu Quoc welcomed more than one million international arrivals, up 61.5 percent year on year, even as international visitors made up only around 30 percent of total arrivals, yet the island generated close to 22.8 trillion VND, equal to 81.8 percent of the entire province's tourism earnings (Vietnam News Agency, 2026). A minority of arrivals is producing the overwhelming majority of the revenue. That is the two-market structure expressed in a single ratio, and it is the ratio an owner should be watching, not the arrivals headline.
Reading the signal in your own market
Phu Quoc is the vivid case, but the pattern travels well beyond it. Any fast-growing destination in the region, from the Vietnamese coast to the emerging island markets across Southeast Asia, can present the same averaged surface over a splitting market, and the discipline it asks for is the same wherever the growth is loudest. Three questions do most of the work. The first is where the new arrivals are coming from, because a surge concentrated in a handful of regional source markets travelling on packages carries very different yield implications than one spread across long-haul premium feeders.
The second is how rate is moving relative to occupancy, since occupancy that climbs while average daily rate stalls is the earliest sign that the new volume is filling rooms without lifting yield. The competitive pipeline deserves the same segmentation, because incoming supply weighted toward one layer of the market resets the economics of every property positioned in that layer, whatever the destination's overall numbers happen to show.
Deciding which market you're in
A market growing in two directions rewards precision and punishes the averaged view. The owners and investors who do well in Phu Quoc over the coming years - through the APEC 2027 build-out and the supply wave that comes with it - will be the ones who settled early on which layer their asset belongs to and priced it for that layer with conviction, instead of treating the destination's headline growth as a verdict on their own returns. That decision costs far less to make before capital is committed than to correct afterwards, once the building is up and the segment it was designed for turns out to be the slowest-growing one. The arrivals chart will keep climbing either way. What deserves an answer is which part of it a given asset can actually convert, and that answer is worth reaching while there is still room to act on it.
References
An Giang Province Portal. (2026). An Giang: Phu Quoc 'locomotive' drives tourism surge. https://angiang.gov.vn/en/an-giang-phu-quoc-locomotive-drives-tourism-surge
Ennismore. (2025). Rixos to redefine luxury all-inclusive in Southeast Asia with new signing in Vietnam. https://ennismore.com/stories/rixos-to-redefine-luxury-all-inclusive-in-southeast-asia-with-new-signing-in-vietnam/
Saigon Giai Phong English. (2026, March 24). An Giang welcomes nearly 830,000 international visitors in first quarter 2026. https://en.sggp.org.vn/an-giang-welcomes-nearly-830000-international-visitors-in-first-quarter-2026-post124853.html
Vietnam News Agency (VietnamPlus). (2024, December 20). Phu Quoc's tourism revenue exceeds 21.17 trillion VND this year. https://en.vietnamplus.vn/phu-quocs-tourism-revenue-exceeds-2117-trillion-vnd-this-year-post307078.vnp
Vietnam News Agency (VietnamPlus). (2025, December). Phu Quoc emerges as a major draw for international tourists. https://en.vietnamplus.vn/phu-quoc-emerges-as-magnet-for-international-tourists-post335103.vnp
Vietnam News Agency (VietnamPlus). (2026, March). Phu Quoc strengthens appeal as international arrivals soar in early 2026. https://en.vietnamplus.vn/phu-quoc-strengthens-appeal-as-international-arrivals-soar-in-early-2026-post338817.vnp
Vietnam News Agency (VnExpress International). (2026, April 21). Asia's 'most beautiful island' welcomes over 1 million foreign tourists in four months. https://e.vnexpress.net/news/travel/places/asia-s-most-beautiful-island-welcomes-over-1-million-foreign-tourists-in-four-months-5065168.html
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