Hoi An budget guide: what $100 actually is right now

Every Hoi An budget guide starts with a dollar figure and then quietly stops mentioning the exchange rate. That is where the maths goes wrong, because the rate moves and the tickets move faster.

At the counter on Phan Chau Trinh in September 2026, a $100 note changes at 25,400₫. Smaller notes get less — $50 notes 25,200₫, $10 and $20 notes 24,900₫, and singles only 23,000₫. So “$100” is really 2,540,000₫ if you bring one clean hundred, and closer to 2,300,000₫ if you turn up with a handful of fives. That difference is a full day of riding and eating. Our exchange rates page is updated as they change.

Two things this Hoi An budget guide does not put inside the $100, and you should be suspicious of any guide that does:

• Your bed. A dorm bed in Vietnam runs roughly $3–7 a night according to 2026 travel-cost guides, and a private room in Hoi An costs more than that. Accommodation varies too much by season and booking date for a fixed number to mean anything, so budget it separately.
• Getting to Hoi An. The flight or bus that brought you here is its own line.

What the $100 does cover, in this guide: three days of transport, fuel, entrance tickets and eating well. Hoi An genuinely is cheap for that — the Post Office Travel Money Long Haul Holiday Report named it the best-value long-haul destination for 2025, with its basket of typical tourist items costing £58.81 — about 11% cheaper than the year before. But “cheap” and “free” are different words, and the gap between them is where most budget trips go wrong.

The one decision that makes or breaks the budget

Here is the number that reorganises the whole plan. A Sun World Ba Na Hills day ticket for a foreign adult in 2026 is 1,000,000₫. Domestic visitors pay 650,000₫.

This is not an argument against Ba Na Hills. The Golden Bridge is genuinely spectacular and the cable car ride is worth doing once. It is an argument for deciding early, because a $100 trip is one of two shapes:

Most people who write to us afterwards say the second shape was the better trip. That is not us being clever; it is just what 1,000,000₫ buys elsewhere in this table.

Getting around: what a bike really costs

Hoi An’s sights are spread out, and the gap between “walkable” and “needs a vehicle” is the single biggest lever on a budget trip. Taxis to My Son and back will cost more than the ticket. A bike does not.

Real fuel maths, because “40k a day” gets copied around without anyone checking it. A small bike uses roughly 1.5–2 litres per 100 km. Three days of proper sightseeing — My Son and back, Marble Mountains and back, plus town runs — is around 130 km, so about 2.5 litres, or 60,000₫ of petrol for the whole trip. Fuel is not what breaks a Hoi An budget guide; tickets are.

Every ticket price in this Hoi An budget guide, in one table

All checked in September 2026. Where foreigners and Vietnamese pay different prices, both are shown — this catches people out at My Son and the Old Town.

Two notes on this table. The Old Town ticket covers five of the numbered heritage sites, not all of them — walking the streets, crossing most bridges and eating there costs nothing. And the Marble Mountains lift is optional: the stairs are free, steep, and the reason the lift exists — full detail in our Marble Mountains guide.

Eating well without spending much

Food is where Hoi An is genuinely, unarguably cheap, and where a budget trip should spend rather than save. The rule of thumb that holds up: eat where the plastic stools are, not where the English menu is laminated.

• Cao lau and mi quang — the two dishes Hoi An is actually known for. A bowl at a street stall is a fraction of what the riverfront restaurants charge for the same thing.
• Banh mi — the cheapest properly good meal in town, and the famous stalls are not more expensive than the anonymous ones.
• Com ga (chicken rice) — a full lunch, everywhere, all day.
• Che and sinh to — dessert and fruit shakes for the price of a bottle of water at home.

We are deliberately not printing exact bowl prices here, because they move and because a guide quoting a 2019 price for cao lau is worse than useless. What matters is the pattern: the same dish costs several times more thirty metres closer to the river. Walk two streets back from the water and the budget stops being a problem.

People who blow a Hoi An budget rarely do it on food. They do it on one ticket and three taxi rides.

A 3-day plan that fits inside $100

This is the version that works: no Ba Na Hills, one bike shared or ridden solo, all tickets real. Figures are for one person riding alone; two people sharing a bike come out cheaper per head.

That leaves roughly 855,000₫ — about $34 — genuinely spare. Which is, not by accident, almost exactly the price of a Hoi An Memories show ticket, or a Cham Island day, or a very good dinner and a tailored shirt. The point of a Hoi An budget guide is not to prove you can survive on $100; it is to show you what you still get to choose afterwards.

The version that does not fit — and what to cut

Now the honest half. Take the same three days and add Ba Na Hills and the Memories show:

That is $22 over, before a single souvenir and before your room. There is no clever trick that closes that gap — the tickets are the tickets. So the choice is real, and it is one of these:

• Drop Ba Na Hills. You keep everything else and finish well under budget. This is what we would do.
• Drop everything else and keep Ba Na Hills. One spectacular day, the Old Town on foot, beaches, and no other tickets.
• Stretch to four or five days. The bike and food costs rise, the ticket costs do not, and the trip gets better per dollar. Hoi An rewards slowness more than most places.
• Raise the budget to $150. Honest answer: this is what a comfortable three days with Ba Na Hills actually costs in 2026.

Free things worth doing anyway

These cost nothing and several of them are better than the ticketed options:

• Walking the Old Town lanes. The heritage ticket covers five specific sites; wandering the streets, watching the lanterns come on at dusk and crossing the market do not need one.
• An Bang and Ha My beaches. Free to enter, free to swim; you pay only if you want a sunbed or a drink.
• The Tra Que and Cam Thanh lanes. The villages charge for their sites, but the ride through the rice fields and coconut water between them is the actual experience.
• Hai Van Pass. No toll, no ticket, one of the great coastal roads. It is 75 km each way from Hoi An, so it is a full day and a proper bike, not an afternoon.
• Linh Ung Pagoda and the Son Tra peninsula. The 67-metre Lady Buddha and the road around the headland cost nothing but fuel.

Money traps that quietly drain the budget

None of these are scams exactly. They are just the places where a careful $100 becomes $130 without anybody noticing.

1. Changing small notesA $100 note gets 25,400₫ here; singles get 23,000₫. Changing $100 in fives costs you roughly 240,000₫ for nothing. Bring large, clean, unmarked notes.
2. “Tell me later” pricesAny bike, boat or basket ride where the price is agreed after the ride costs more than one agreed before it. Ask for the total in a message, not a conversation.
3. Riverfront seatingThe same bowl of cao lau changes price dramatically over thirty metres. Sitting two streets back is the single easiest saving in town.
4. Taxis to My SonA return taxi to My Son will cost more than the 150,000₫ ticket and the bike put together. This is the trip that most justifies renting.
5. Helmet and delivery add-onsA headline rate of 80,000₫ that adds helmets, delivery and a fuel charge is not cheaper than 120,000₫ with all of it included. Ask what the total is.
6. Card machines with a “small fee”A 3% card surcharge on a 1,000,000₫ ticket is 30,000₫. Carry cash for tickets.

Questions we get asked

Prices checked September 2026. Exchange rates are the counter rates at 84 Phan Chau Trinh (25,400₫ per $100 note, updated 26 August 2026) and move — see our exchange page for the current board. Old Town, Thanh Ha, Tra Que and Bay Mau coconut forest prices from Vietnamese travel-price listings for 2026; My Son from the My Son Heritage and Tourism Management Board; Ba Na Hills from Sun World’s published 2026 price list; Marble Mountains from our own on-site guide; Cham Island fees and speedboat fares from 2026 operator listings. Petrol is E10 RON 95-III at 24,239₫/litre, set 10 September 2026. Food figures are our own estimate for eating at local stalls, not a surveyed average. Ticket prices change without much notice — treat this Hoi An budget guide as a starting point and check on the day.