Landmark 81: Vietnam’s tallest building
Landmark 81 is a 461 metre skyscraper on the banks of the Saigon River, and it is the tallest building in Vietnam by a long way. It has 81 floors, which is where the name comes from, and since it opened in July 2018 it has been the thing you see first when you look at the Ho Chi Minh City skyline from anywhere.
It was designed by Atkins, a British firm whose other work includes the sail-shaped Burj al-Arab in Dubai, and built by the Vietnamese contractor Coteccons for around 270 million dollars. The owner is Vingroup, the conglomerate whose name you will see attached to half the modern development in this country. The whole thing went up in about four years, which for a building of this size is quick.
The bamboo story
The shape is not an accident. The tower is designed to look like a bundle of bamboo stalks tied together, a symbol of strength through unity that runs deep in Vietnamese culture. Underneath the poetry it is a fairly clever piece of engineering: 36 separate blocks of different heights, clustered in a six by six grid, with the tallest ones in the middle. It is the same structural idea as the Willis Tower in Chicago.
Whether you see bamboo when you look at it is another matter. Plenty of people just see a tall building. But once someone points it out, the clustered stalks are hard to unsee.
About that “tallest in Southeast Asia” claim
You will read in a lot of places that Landmark 81 is the tallest building in Southeast Asia. It was, from 2018 until Merdeka 118 opened in Kuala Lumpur and took the title. It is now the second tallest in the region.
That does not diminish it. It is still comfortably the tallest building in Vietnam, and the gap is not small: Hanoi’s Landmark 72 comes in at 336 metres, a full 125 metres shorter. Landmark 81 is not the tallest thing in Southeast Asia any more, but in Vietnam it is not close.
What is inside
It is a small vertical city, and knowing the layout saves you time when you arrive.
The basement levels and the first three floors are the Vincom Center mall, along with a cinema and an ice rink. Above that are apartments, floor after floor of them, from the sixth up into the forties. From floor 47 to 71 is a five-star Marriott hotel. The seventies are where the restaurants, bars and lounges live, and right at the top, on floors 79 to 81, is the SkyView observation deck at around 383 metres.
The important part for a visitor: the ticket desk for the deck is down in the basement, not at the entrance, and the bars in the seventies are a separate thing entirely. More on why that matters shortly.
Where it actually is
This is the bit that catches people out. Landmark 81 is not in District 1. It sits north of the centre, on the river, inside a large modern development called Vinhomes Central Park, and it is a fifteen to twenty-five minute drive from the city centre depending on the traffic.
That distance shapes everything about visiting. This is not a sight you stumble into while walking between the cathedral and the market. It is a deliberate trip, and it works best as an evening one. There is nothing historic here, nothing you would call old Saigon. What there is instead is a river, a park, a very tall building, and a view.
The SkyView observation deck
This is what most people come for. SkyView sits on floors 79, 80 and 81, at around 383 metres, and it is the highest you can get in Vietnam. The lift takes you up in well under a minute, and then you are standing above the whole sprawling mess of Ho Chi Minh City with the Saigon River curling away below you.
The view is genuinely excellent. Everything else about the experience needs a more honest look.
Tickets and prices
Prices move, so treat these as a guide rather than gospel, but the structure is consistent.
- Standard adult ticket: around 300,000 dong on weekdays, rising to around 500,000 dong at weekends and on public holidays.
- Combo ticket: from around 420,000 to 480,000 dong, adding a VR experience, a drink, and a printed photo.
- Children between 1m and 1.4m: roughly half price. Under 1 metre is free.
- Students and seniors: discounted, but bring ID or you will not get it.
Two practical things that catch people out every day.
The ticket desk is in the basement. You walk in at ground level, and then you have to go down to B1, inside the mall, to buy your ticket. There is no ticket counter at the main entrance. People wander around the lobby looking confused for a good ten minutes before someone points them downstairs.
You cannot pay cash. It is card or bank transfer only, which is an unpleasant surprise if you have deliberately been carrying dong all day and do not love using a foreign card abroad.
Booking online through a platform like Klook is fine, but do not expect miracles. It is not reliably cheaper than the desk, and, importantly, it does not let you skip the queue. You will stand in the same line as everyone else.
What is included, and what is actually worth it
The combo ticket sounds generous. In practice most of it is filler, and it is worth knowing which parts before you pay the extra.
The Sky Touch outdoor walkway. The good one. You are strapped into a harness and step out onto an open section of the deck, in the open air, at nearly 400 metres. It is a genuinely good few minutes and the only extra that earns its place.
The glass floor. Fun when it is open. It is frequently closed, so do not build your visit around it.
The VR experience. A virtual climb up the outside of the tower and a paraglide back down. It is consistently the weakest part of the visit. It is poorly explained, nobody tells you what it actually is before you buy it, and it is more of a VR video than a game. If you buy any part of the combo, buy it for the walkway, not this.
The free drink. Handed to you through a hatch at the side of a restaurant rather than served to you in it. It is not a nice moment and it is not a nice drink.
The printed photo. Poor.
The honest verdict: take the standard ticket. The combo adds cost and very little else, and the one genuinely good extra can usually be added separately. If you do want the VR, buy it downstairs at the desk, because you cannot add it once you are up on the 79th floor.
The best time to go
If you take one thing from this guide, take this: go about an hour before sunset and stay until after dark.
You get three visits for the price of one. The city in daylight, so you can actually see the scale of it and pick out the river, the bridges, and the districts. Then the sunset. Then the whole thing lit up, which is when the view goes from impressive to genuinely beautiful, because Saigon at night from 383 metres is a very good thing to look at. There is no time limit on your ticket, so nobody will move you along.
Go on a weekday if you can. Weekends are both busier and considerably more expensive, and the deck is not large enough to absorb a crowd comfortably.
And check the weather first. Haze and low cloud are common here, and on a bad day you pay full price to look at grey. There are no refunds for a poor view.
The honest take on the deck
The view is superb. The experience around it is thin.
The viewing area is smaller than most people expect. It is two floors of glass rather than a big open platform, and while you can walk around, it does not feel like a proper 360 degree sweep. On a busy evening it can feel cramped.
More noticeably, there is nothing to it beyond the view. No information, no signage explaining what you are looking at, no guide, no audio tour, nothing to tell you which river that is or what that building over there was. You buy an expensive ticket, you go up, you look, you come down. For a country this rich in history, standing 383 metres above one of its great cities and being told absolutely nothing about it is a real missed opportunity.
By Vietnamese standards it is also expensive. Three hundred thousand dong is a very good dinner. Five hundred is a very good dinner for two.
None of that means do not go. It means go with your eyes open, at the right time of day, on the standard ticket. And it means it is worth knowing that the deck is not the only way up.
How to see the view without buying a ticket
Here is the thing nobody selling you a ticket wants to mention: you do not need one.
There are bars and lounges high up inside Landmark 81 that you can walk into for the price of a drink. No queue, no ticket desk in a basement, no card-only rule, and you get a seat, air conditioning, and something cold in your hand while you look at exactly the same city. For a lot of people, this is the better visit.
Blank Lounge, floors 75 and 76
The best-known option. Blank Lounge sits just four floors below the observation deck, and the view is, for all practical purposes, the same one. You are still looking down on the entire city and the river, still at over 350 metres, and the difference in height is not something your eyes will notice.
What you get instead of a ticket is a bar. Somewhere to sit, a proper drink, and a much calmer atmosphere than the deck at sunset. It is a nice place to spend an hour, particularly at night when the city is lit and the terrace is at its best.
Two honest caveats. The terrace is small, so it works far better for two people than for a group. And drinks here are priced for the location, so you are not exactly saving money, you are spending roughly the same and getting something better for it.
The Cloud, floor 48
The one almost nobody knows about, and my quiet favourite.
The Cloud is on the 48th floor, inside the hotel, and you reach it through the Vinpearl hotel entrance near the Starbucks rather than through the mall. You simply walk in and take the lift up. There is no queue at all.
It is lower than the deck, and that is precisely the point. From 383 metres the city becomes an abstract carpet of lights. From the 48th floor you are still high above everything but close enough to actually read the city: you can pick out streets, watch traffic moving along the river road, see the boats, make out individual buildings. Plenty of people who have done both find this view more interesting than the one from the top, and it is quieter, cheaper to reach, and you never wait.
Which one to choose
Go up the deck if the point of the trip is to stand at the very top of Vietnam. That is a real thing, and if it matters to you, no bar will replace it. Buy the standard ticket and go at sunset.
Go to a bar instead if what you actually want is the view, a drink, and a good evening. You will spend roughly the same money, skip the queue entirely, get a seat, and leave in a better mood.
Do both if you are here for a while. The deck at sunset one evening, a drink at The Cloud another.
The one thing worth knowing before you turn up in shorts: the bars have a dress code and the deck does not. Smart casual is enough, but flip flops and a vest will get you turned away upstairs while the observation deck would have let you in without a glance.
Other things to do at Landmark 81
The tower is not just the view. Most of what is here is modern city living rather than sightseeing, and it is worth being clear about that. But a few parts are genuinely good, and the best one costs nothing at all.
Vinhomes Central Park
The best thing at Landmark 81 that is not the view, and it is free.
This is a large, well-kept riverside park at the foot of the tower, with lawns, walking paths, and a long promenade along the Saigon River. It is green, it is quiet, and in a city with very little accessible open space that makes it genuinely valuable. Locals use it properly: joggers, families, kids on bikes, people barbecuing in the evening.
Come in the late afternoon and walk the river. Looking up at the tower from the grass is a better angle on the building than anything you get from inside it, and it is the one part of a Landmark 81 visit that feels like a nice thing to do rather than a thing you paid for.
Vincom Center mall
Three floors of shops at the base of the tower, with international brands, a food court, and plenty of cafes and restaurants. It is a mall, and it behaves like one.
It is useful when it is raining or too hot to be outside, and the ticket desk for the observation deck is down here, so you will end up walking through it anyway. But nobody should come to Ho Chi Minh City to visit a shopping centre, and this one is not a reason to make the trip.
Vincom Ice Rink
Down at B1, and one of the largest ice rinks in Vietnam at around 2,000 square metres.
Ice skating in a tropical city is a strange and pleasing idea, and it works. It is genuinely good with kids, it is properly cold, and it is a solid option in the middle of a hot afternoon. Skates are available to hire, and there are animal-shaped skating aids for small children who have never been on ice. Weekends get busy.
CGV cinema
Also at B1, with a large-format IMAX screen. A modern, comfortable, air-conditioned cinema.
It is not a travel experience, but if you have been walking around in 35 degrees all day and you need two hours of cold darkness, it does the job better than most things.
Restaurants and bars in the sky
The upper floors, from the seventies up, are full of high-end restaurants and bars: Japanese, steakhouses, cocktail lounges, all with the city underneath them.
They are good, and they are priced accordingly. If you want to eat with a view, this is one of the best places in Vietnam to do it. If you want a drink with a view, see the section above, because that is the smarter play.
How to get to Landmark 81
Landmark 81 sits in Binh Thanh, north of the centre on the river, so getting there takes a bit of thought. It is not far in kilometres. It can be far in minutes.
Grab or taxi
The default, and for most visitors the right answer.
From District 1 it is a fifteen to twenty-five minute drive, and the fare is usually somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 dong depending on where you start and what the traffic is doing. Book it in the app, watch the price before you accept, and you are done.
The one thing to avoid is rush hour. Between about 7am and 9am, and again from 4:30pm to 6:30pm, the roads into Binh Thanh clog badly and a twenty minute trip can double. If you are going for sunset, leave earlier than you think you need to. Our guide to Grab and taxis in Ho Chi Minh City covers how the apps work here.
The metro
Metro Line 1 runs right past Landmark 81, and the nearest stop is Tan Cang. The train is cheap, air-conditioned, fast, and it completely ignores the traffic that makes the drive unpredictable. On paper it is the perfect way to get here.
Then you have to walk, and this is the part nobody tells you.
There is no pedestrian bridge across the Vo Nguyen Giap highway between the station and the complex. To get from Tan Cang to the foot of the tower you have to walk around the station and underneath the Saigon Bridge, alongside a lot of fast-moving traffic. It is roughly 600 metres, so eight to ten minutes, and it is not a pleasant eight to ten minutes. In the cool of the evening it is perfectly manageable. At two in the afternoon in full sun, with children, it is grim.
Use the metro if you are travelling light, going in the evening, and the traffic is bad. Take a Grab if you want the door.
The Saigon Waterbus
Worth understanding properly, because the answer is not what people expect.
The waterbus is a wonderful way to see Landmark 81. The route runs along the Saigon River right past the tower, and the view of the building from the water, especially at dusk with the lights coming on, is the best angle there is. If you want a good photograph of the thing, take the boat.
It is not, however, a good way to get to it. The nearest stop is Binh An Pier, and Binh An is on the opposite bank of the river. From there it is around 2.5 kilometres and a 35 minute walk to reach Landmark 81, going the long way round over the bridge. You would need a Grab at the other end anyway.
So use the waterbus as an experience in its own right, and enjoy the tower from the deck of the boat. Do not plan it as your transport there.
Bus
City buses run to the area and cost almost nothing, with several lines stopping close to the complex.
They are also slow, hot, crowded, and confusing if you do not read Vietnamese. Forty minutes on a bus to save two dollars is not a trade most visitors want to make. Take the Grab.
Nearby, and what to combine it with
Be honest about this: there is not much.
Landmark 81 is in a modern residential district. There are no temples here, no museums, no colonial buildings, no old Saigon. It does not slot neatly into a day of sightseeing in District 1, and trying to bolt it onto one usually means an hour in traffic for a view you could have seen better in the evening.
The things that genuinely work with it:
Vinhomes Central Park. Already covered, and the obvious pairing. Walk the river before or after you go up.
Thao Dien. Across the river and a short Grab ride away, this is the expat neighbourhood and the natural place to eat and drink afterwards. Good restaurants, craft beer, and riverside bars. If you are making the trip out here anyway, this is how you turn it into an evening.
Van Thanh Park. A green, low-key local park nearby, with grass, ponds and a pool. Nothing spectacular, but a pleasant, very Vietnamese place to sit, and a short ride away.
Binh Quoi Village. Further up the river, and a different kind of evening again. Binh Quoi Village is a green riverside spot built around Vietnamese food and old-Saigon atmosphere, and it makes a good pairing if you want something calmer than Thao Dien.
The practical answer for most people: treat Landmark 81 as an evening trip in its own right. Go out at five, walk the park, go up for sunset, eat in Thao Dien, and go home. That is a good evening. Trying to squeeze it between the War Remnants Museum and Ben Thanh Market is not.
Staying at Landmark 81
You can sleep in Vietnam’s tallest building, and for the right traveller it is a genuinely special thing to do. For the wrong one it is an expensive mistake. It is worth being clear about which you are.
The hotel
The five-star hotel occupies floors 47 to 71 and runs under Marriott’s Autograph Collection brand, with a little over 200 rooms.
It is a proper luxury hotel and it delivers what you would hope for: floor-to-ceiling windows with the whole city underneath you, a pool up in the sky, a spa, and restaurants and bars a few floors above your room. Waking up above the clouds in Ho Chi Minh City is not an ordinary experience, and the hotel knows it and charges accordingly.
Apartments and Airbnb
This is what most people actually book, and it works well.
There are a large number of short-term apartments inside the tower itself and across the wider Vinhomes Central Park complex, listed on Airbnb and the usual booking sites. You get a full apartment, often with a kitchen, usually with a balcony, and frequently with a view that would cost you several times as much in the hotel upstairs. For a family or a couple staying a few days, it is very good value for what it is.
A warning about the names
Watch what you are booking.
A number of listings market themselves with names like “Luxury Radisson Landmark 81” or similar. These are not branded hotels. They are apartment rental operations inside the Vinhomes complex, using names designed to sound like international chains. Some of them are perfectly good. None of them are what the name implies, and you should not expect hotel service, a front desk, or any of the standards that come with the brand they are borrowing from.
Read the listing carefully, check the reviews, and understand that you are renting an apartment from an operator, not checking into a hotel.
Who it is actually right for
Here is the honest answer, and it is not a straightforward yes.
Staying at Landmark 81 is a treat, and it is one that works beautifully for the right trip. If you are coming to Saigon for a few days of luxury, if you have been to Vietnam before, or if this is a return visit where you already ticked off the museums and the markets, then waking up on the sixtieth floor with the river below you is a wonderful thing.
But it is the wrong choice for a first visit. You are a fifteen to twenty-five minute drive from almost everything you came to see, and that drive is unpredictable. Every trip to the War Remnants Museum, Ben Thanh Market, the Reunification Palace or the cathedral costs you time in traffic, twice a day, and on a two or three day itinerary that adds up to hours you do not have. For a first trip, District 1 is worth more to you than a view.
The rule of thumb: stay in District 1 to see Saigon. Stay at Landmark 81 to enjoy Saigon. They are different trips.
Practical tips for visiting Landmark 81
Everything else you need to know before you go, most of which nobody tells you until you are already standing there.
Opening hours
The SkyView deck opens at around 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning and closes at around 21:30 to 22:00, with the last entry shortly before closing. The mall runs roughly 10:00 to 22:00, opening a little earlier at weekends.
These do shift, especially around holidays, so check before you make the trip out. It is a long way to go and find the deck closed for a private event.
How long to spend
Allow one to one and a half hours for the deck itself, including the queue, the lift, and enough time to actually stand and look rather than take three photos and leave. There is no time limit on the ticket, so you can stay through sunset into dark, which is what you should be doing.
Add another hour if you are walking the riverside park, and more again if you are eating or drinking upstairs. A proper Landmark 81 evening is about three hours from arriving to leaving.
Bring a layer
This is the tip people wish they had read.
The outdoor section of the deck is windy and genuinely cold, especially after dark. You are at nearly 400 metres, the wind up there has nothing in its way, and the difference between the street and the open deck is startling. Families with small children in particular get caught out, standing in a t-shirt at the top of Vietnam wondering why nobody warned them.
A light jacket or a long-sleeve top is enough. Bring one.
Card only
You cannot pay cash at the ticket desk. It is card or bank transfer, and there is no way around it. If you have been travelling on cash all week, this one stings.
Check the weather first
The view is the entire product, and haze and low cloud are common in this city. On a bad day you pay full price to look at grey soup, and there are no refunds.
Look at the sky before you commit to the trip. A clear afternoon means a spectacular evening. A murky one means you are better off going another day, or going to a bar where at least you get a drink out of it.
Facilities
It is a modern skyscraper, so everything works. Clean toilets, air conditioning, lifts, English signage in the mall, plenty of food and coffee. There is a small shop and a restaurant at the top.
What you will not find is any interpretation: no guide, no audio tour, and no information about what you are actually looking at. If you want that context, you need to bring it with you.
Dress code
None for the observation deck. Turn up in whatever you have been wearing all day and nobody will look twice.
The bars and restaurants upstairs are a different matter, and smart casual is expected. Flip flops, vests and beachwear will get you turned away from Blank Lounge while the deck four floors up would have let you straight in.
Fireworks and big nights
Landmark 81 is one of the best places in the city to watch fireworks, and Ho Chi Minh City puts on a serious show three times a year: Tet, New Year’s Eve, and Reunification Day at the end of April.
On those nights the deck, the bars and the restaurants all book out, often weeks in advance, and prices go up. The riverside park below fills with people watching for free, which is honestly a very good option in its own right and costs nothing.
If you are in Saigon for one of those dates and you want to be up high for it, book early. If you leave it to the day, you will be watching from the grass with everyone else, which is not a bad place to be.
Is Landmark 81 worth visiting?
It depends what you came to Vietnam for.
If you like cities from above, this is the best view in the country and it is not close. Ho Chi Minh City is enormous, and from up here you finally understand the shape of it: the river winding through, the bridges, the sprawl reaching the horizon, the traffic reduced to something almost peaceful. At night it is genuinely beautiful. It is also the one place that shows you what Vietnam has built in the last decade, rather than what it inherited.
But if you came for history, culture and food, this gives you none of it. It is a tall building with a mall at the bottom and a bar at the top, and nothing here that you could not find in Bangkok or Dubai. On a tight two or three day trip, skip it. That evening buys you far more at Cholon or a food tour.
The honest recommendation, if you do go: go for the view, but skip the deck ticket. Head out in the late afternoon, walk the riverside park, then take a seat at The Cloud or Blank Lounge with a drink and watch the city light up. Same view, no queue, roughly the same money, and a much better evening. Cross to Thao Dien afterwards and eat well.
The view is the point. It turns out you can have it sitting down.
