Russian Easy Riders in Nha Trang

NHA TRANG, VIETNAM – Russian Easy Riders in Nha Trang is a story about how quickly a tourism market can change. Around 2014-2015, the city was experiencing a major shift in its international visitor mix. Russian tourists had become a dominant market, while Chinese arrivals were growing rapidly. For the local Easy Riders and motorcycle-tour groups who had built their business around Western travellers, this change would have a serious impact…

When Russian Tourism Took Over

Nha Trang had already become one of Vietnam’s best-known beach destinations for Russian travellers before the major changes of 2014–2015. In 2014, Russian visitors were the largest international market in Khanh Hoa, with about 245,000 arrivals, an increase of more than 60 percent from the previous year. Contemporary reports described Russian tourism as accounting for a very large share of the city’s international market.

You could see the change on the streets.

Restaurants displayed Russian-language menus. Hotels and businesses adapted their services to Russian customers, and Russian-speaking tourism services became increasingly common. An Australian Broadcasting Corporation report from September 2015 described Nha Trang as the centre of Russian tourism in Vietnam and noted how visible the Russian presence had become throughout the city.

For the tourism industry, this was a major opportunity.

For some of the older motorcycle-tour businesses, however, it was a very different story.

A Different Kind of Tourist Market

The Easy Rider business in Nha Trang had grown around foreign travellers who wanted to explore Vietnam by motorcycle. Many of these customers came from Europe, Australia, North America and other Western markets.

They were the kind of travellers who might spend several days riding from Nha Trang into the Central Highlands, visiting villages, countryside and smaller towns along the way.

But the new mass-market tourism that was developing in Nha Trang did not necessarily create the same demand.

The city was increasingly being served by package tours and large organised groups. Russian visitors became a major market, and then Chinese tourism expanded rapidly.

In 2015, Chinese arrivals to Khanh Hoa reached about 180,000, roughly five times the number recorded in 2014. By early 2016, Chinese visitors had become the province’s second-largest international market after Russia.

The market that had supported the older motorcycle-tour scene was changing underneath it.

The Western Travellers Started to Disappear

For people working in the motorcycle-tour business, the change was noticeable.

It was not simply that another nationality had arrived. The whole character of the tourism market was changing.

Contemporary reports from 2014 noted that while Russian arrivals were rising sharply, several traditional Western markets – including the United States, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Canada and the United Kingdom – were showing signs of decline.

At the same time, the Russian market itself was not stable forever. By late 2014, the falling Russian rouble had already caused Russian bookings to Nha Trang to drop sharply. Some tour companies reported reductions of 50 percent or more.

So Nha Trang’s tourism market was going through several changes at once.

The old Western customer base was weakening.

The Russian market was becoming dominant but then faced its own economic problems.

And Chinese tourism was rising rapidly to fill part of the gap.

What Happened to the Easy Riders?

For the local Easy Riders, this was a serious problem.

Their business depended on having foreign travellers who wanted to ride.

When the customer base changed, the motorcycle-tour business suffered with it.

Some riders stopped getting enough work to continue as Easy Riders. Groups that had once taken tourists out of Nha Trang on multi-day motorcycle journeys gradually disappeared. Some riders had to find other work to support themselves.

This is one reason the Nha Trang Easy Rider scene that had been visible during the earlier period eventually became much smaller.

It was not necessarily because the riders had suddenly lost their skills or because travellers no longer liked motorcycle tours.

The market had changed.

A tour business can disappear even when the product itself is still good if the customers who used to buy it are no longer there.

The End of an Era

For me, this period marked the end of an important chapter in Nha Trang’s motorcycle-tour history.

The city had once been an important base for Easy Riders travelling with Western visitors into the Central Highlands and along longer motorcycle routes. After the tourism market changed, that old business model became much harder to sustain.

Later, motorcycle tours would appear again in different forms. But the older Nha Trang Easy Rider scene – the riders, groups and routes that had developed before the big change in the city’s international tourism market – never returned in quite the same way.

That is an important part of the history of Vietnam’s Easy Riders.

The business did not disappear because motorcycles stopped being interesting.

It disappeared because the market around it changed.

And Nha Trang was one of the clearest examples of how quickly that can happen.

Nam Ngo
September 2026