A new certification scheme wants to separate genuine sustainability from the towel-reuse card on your pillow. I went looking for the detail behind the headline.
[COVER IMAGE GOES HERE – set as WordPress Featured Image only, not embedded in body. Description: Dragon Bridge in Da Nang lit up at night during a fireworks display, editor-owned photo. Distinct from Image 1 (Monkey Mountain dusk) and Image 2 (Da Nang coastline/Han River) further down. ALT text: “A dragon-shaped bridge illuminated at night with fireworks bursting in the sky above a river.” Caption: “Da Nang after dark: the city chasing spectacle and, this month, trying to prove it can chase substance too. Delete this marker once the image is uploaded.”]
Stand on the beach road in Da Nang at dusk and you’ll see two versions of the same city arguing with each other. Behind you, the hills of Son Tra rise up dark and unbroken, home to the red-shanked douc langur, a primate so rare it exists almost nowhere else on earth. In front of you, a wall of glass-fronted resorts runs the length of the coast, lit up like a runway. Da Nang has spent two decades building the second version. This month, it started trying to prove the first one still matters.
On 14 August, the city’s Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism approved a 219-point certification standard for hotels, resorts and homestays. It is, by some distance, the most detailed sustainability benchmark any Vietnamese city has put its name to. It is also, on paper, entirely optional, and that is the first thing worth sitting with before getting excited about the number 219.
Monkey Mountain rises above Da Nang at dusk, home to one of the world’s rarest primates and a reminder of what the city’s new standard is ultimately meant to protect.
What’s actually in the 219 points
The criteria were built with Switzerland’s ST4SD project (Swiss Tourism for Sustainable Development in Vietnam), drawing directly on the Swisstainable model used across Switzerland’s own hospitality sector, and cross-referenced against the Global Sustainable Tourism Council’s international standards. They are not starting from nothing. Da Nang has inherited and rebuilt on the former Quang Nam Green Tourism Criteria, a scheme already in use before the two provinces merged, and folded in what were previously three separate, overlapping certification schemes into one.
The 219 points split into nine groups, and the split tells you where the real weight sits. Fifty-nine criteria cover environmental management alone, the largest single category. Maintenance takes 52. Green procurement, meaning what a hotel actually buys and from whom, accounts for 33. Staff training gets 32. The rest, a smaller allocation each, covers housekeeping and laundry, gardening, kitchen and restaurant operations, cultural experience programmes, and sustainable event management. This is not a scheme built around solar panels and a recycling bin in reception. It reaches into supply chains and staff rotas, which is exactly the kind of detail that’s harder to fake.
Properties don’t need to hit all 219 to take part. The scheme runs on three voluntary levels, scaled to a property’s size and existing capacity. Level 1 asks for 54 criteria, aimed at hotels just starting out. Level 2 asks for 124, for places with some sustainable practice already in place. Level 3 is the full 219, reserved for operators positioning themselves as genuine sector leaders. A small guesthouse and a five-star resort are not being held to the same bar, which is a more honest way to run a voluntary scheme than pretending everyone starts from the same place.
Why “Da Nang” is bigger than you might think
Here’s a detail that will matter if you’re planning a trip and haven’t been paying close attention to Vietnamese administrative reform, which, fairly enough, is most people. In 2025, Da Nang and the neighbouring province of Quang Nam merged into a single administrative unit under the Da Nang name, one of dozens of similar mergers carried out across the country that year. The new Da Nang now covers close to 12,000 square kilometres, and its territory includes what used to be Hoi An, along with the My Son Sanctuary ruins and Cu Lao Cham marine park.
Hoi An itself is no longer a separate city. It’s now a ward inside Da Nang. Cao Tri Dung, chairman of the Da Nang Tourism Association, has already floated developing Hoi An specifically as an internationally recognised green destination under the same wider push. Nothing about Green Stay certification currently confirms which specific Hoi An properties, if any, have applied, so don’t take this as a guarantee that your favourite riverside guesthouse there is certified. But it does mean the same tourism authority now overseeing this scheme is the one responsible for Hoi An too, and it would be a reasonable bet that certified properties there follow at some point.
Da Nang’s coastline, now administratively stretching to include Hoi An and the wider former Quang Nam province. Photo by Supanut Arunoprayote
How it stacks up against everything else claiming to be green
Da Nang’s own tourism association has been open about the fact that the hospitality sector is already crowded with sustainability labels: VITA Green, ASEAN Green Hotel, EarthCheck, Travelife, and TUU Eco Stay Awards all operate in the same space, alongside GSTC’s own certification. Some of these carry real independent audit behind them. Others are closer to self-declared badges a hotel can print on its own website with nobody checking. Asia Unmasked has written before about how to tell the difference, and it’s worth reading before you take any single green label at face value, this one included. That article can be found in the further reading section at the foot of this article.
What makes Green Stay different, at least in principle, is that it’s a government-run scheme rather than a private certification body selling audits, and it explicitly folds in three pre-existing local schemes rather than adding a fourth logo to an already confusing pile. Whether that translates into a more rigorous audit process than a commercial certifier, or simply a more centralised one, isn’t yet clear from what’s been published. The criteria document itself hasn’t been made fully public in English at the time of writing, so exactly how compliance gets checked, and by whom, is a genuine open question rather than something I can wave away with reassurance.
The honest question: does voluntary mean anything?
A voluntary scheme with no penalty for non-participation and, as far as has been published, no independent third-party audit, is not the same thing as regulation. Da Nang’s tourism department has been explicit that this isn’t meant to replace existing legal requirements, it sits alongside them. That’s a reasonable, honest framing rather than overselling what’s happened here. It also means the real test isn’t the 14 August announcement, it’s how many properties actually apply, how many reach Level 3 rather than settling for the easier Level 1, and whether the city publishes a genuinely checkable list of who’s certified at what level.
None of that makes the scheme meaningless. A detailed, government-endorsed framework that 60 percent of the city’s tourism businesses, which is roughly the share operating in accommodation, can actually measure themselves against is a real step beyond vague marketing language. It’s just not, yet, proof of anything beyond intent. The distinction matters if you’re deciding where to stay.
What to actually do with this if you’re booking Da Nang
Da Nang sits on Vietnam’s central coast, reached directly by Da Nang International Airport, with connections from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in a little over an hour, and a growing number of direct regional and international routes. It’s a genuinely easy add-on to a wider central Vietnam itinerary, now more so than ever given Hoi An’s ancient town and My Son’s ruins fall under the same administrative area.
If you’re booking a stay from this autumn onward, the practical move is simple: ask the property directly whether it holds Green Stay status, and if so, at what level. A Level 1 property that’s just started the process isn’t a red flag, it’s a more honest position than a hotel claiming to be fully sustainable overnight. What’s worth being sceptical of is a property using the language of the scheme, “green,” “sustainable,” “eco-conscious”, without being able to name an actual certification or level when asked directly. That gap, between the language and the paperwork, is exactly where greenwashing usually lives.
Properties register through Da Nang’s Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism directly, so if you’re an operator reading this rather than a traveller, that’s the door to knock on rather than a private certifying body.
Further Reading
The Sustainability Labels on Your Hotel Booking, Decoded
Vietnam’s 2025 Provincial Restructuring: What Travellers Need to Know
Con Dao National Park Joins Elite IUCN Green List: Another String in the Bow of Vietnam’s Sustainable Tourism
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