NHA TRANG, VIETNAM – Nha Trang Motorcycle Tours began to change after the BBC’s Top Gear Vietnam Special brought Vietnam’s roads to a much wider Western audience in 2008. Local Easy Riders were already taking foreign travellers on long motorcycle journeys, but a new development soon appeared: some foreigners began working with Vietnamese riders to organise, market and sell motorcycle tours themselves, creating a different business model in Nha Trang…
After Top Gear, the Market Changed
Before 2008, Nha Trang already had local riders taking foreign visitors on motorcycle journeys to the Central Highlands and other parts of Vietnam. The business was closely connected with the local Easy Rider scene.
Then Top Gear came to Vietnam.
The programme showed three presenters travelling across the country by motorcycle, including the road between Da Lat and Nha Trang. The episode became widely known among Western travellers and helped put Vietnam’s motorcycle journeys in front of a much larger international audience.
In Nha Trang, more people saw an opportunity.
Local riders were not the only ones interested. Some Westerners living in or frequently visiting Nha Trang also began working with Vietnamese riders to sell motorcycle tours to foreign travellers.
This created a new layer in the business.
A Foreigner Who Knew the Local Market
I remember one foreigner who became involved in this way.
He could speak Vietnamese and had a Vietnamese wife. He also had Vietnamese friends and contacts in Nha Trang, so he understood the local environment much better than a foreign visitor simply passing through.
He organised motorcycle tours himself and often took foreign customers on the road.
Because he could communicate with local people and already had connections in Nha Trang, he was able to arrange riders and other services relatively easily.
There was, however, another side to the story.
On one occasion, when someone asked him for a tourist-guide card, he showed his own personal identification card and represented it as his tour-guide card. From what I saw and understood at the time, it was not a Vietnamese tourist-guide card.
I mention this as a personal recollection, rather than making a wider claim about the legal status of his business.
The incident also illustrates a problem that could arise when foreign individuals became involved in selling tours in Vietnam without necessarily coming through the same professional system as licensed Vietnamese guides and travel companies.
Foreign Tour Sellers and Local Riders
Another example involved a tourism office in Nha Trang that was already selling motorcycle tours.
The company obtained a fleet of Chinese-made Lifan motorcycles from an Australian man. The bikes were used for motorcycle tours with foreign visitors.
The Australian later learned how the business worked.
Instead of simply supplying motorcycles, he began organising and selling tours himself. He built his own website and marketed the tours directly to customers in Australia.
This gave him an advantage that many local riders did not have.
He was in Australia.
He understood how to advertise to Australian travellers, communicate with potential customers before they arrived and sell the tour directly into his home market.
Once he had the bookings, he could arrange the actual motorcycle tours in Vietnam by hiring local riders in Nha Trang – including Easy Riders and local motorcycle drivers – to take the customers on the road.
The business therefore became divided into two parts.
The customer and marketing side was handled overseas.
The actual tour operation in Vietnam was handled by local riders.
A Different Business Model
This was quite different from the traditional Easy Rider model.
An original local Easy Rider generally found customers through hotels, travel agencies, word of mouth, other riders or direct contact with travellers in Vietnam.
The foreign-run model could work from the opposite direction.
The customer was found first – sometimes thousands of kilometres away – through advertising and a website. The tour was then delivered in Vietnam by local riders.
The foreign operator did not necessarily need to ride every tour himself.
He needed to sell the product.
That distinction became increasingly important as the internet changed the way travellers booked tours.
A local rider might be excellent on the road but have little experience with international online marketing. A foreign operator living in Australia could have the opposite strengths: strong access to customers and advertising channels, but a need for local people to actually operate the tour.
The two sides could therefore work together.
What About the Legal Side?
There is another question that naturally comes from this history: were all of these foreign-run motorcycle-tour businesses legally registered and operating with the required licences and tax arrangements in Vietnam?
I cannot answer that for individual operators without seeing their company registrations, licences and tax records.
Vietnamese tourism law has long required international tour operators serving foreign visitors to meet specific licensing conditions, while tourist guides working with foreign tourists have also been subject to requirements concerning tourist-guide cards and their relationship with travel enterprises.
That does not mean that every foreign person involved in a motorcycle tour was operating illegally. A foreigner could potentially work through a properly established Vietnamese company or another legally recognised arrangement.
But simply living in Australia, owning a website and selling a Vietnam tour did not, by itself, establish that the Vietnam-side operation was properly licensed.
That is something that would have to be checked case by case.
The Beginning of a New Era
The important part of this story is not whether every foreign operator was successful or whether every business arrangement was legal.
It is how the motorcycle-tour industry in Nha Trang began to change.
The older Easy Rider model was built around local riders who knew the roads, the countryside and the culture. After 2008, the market became more international and more commercial. Foreigners began to participate in marketing, customer acquisition and tour organisation, while local riders continued to provide the knowledge and riding skills needed on the ground.
The internet made that separation even easier.
A customer in Australia could find a tour online, book it before leaving home and arrive in Nha Trang already expecting a local rider to take them on the road.
The motorcycle, the route and the rider were still in Vietnam.
But the business selling the experience could now be somewhere else.
For Nha Trang’s motorcycle-tour industry, that was an important change – and one that would become increasingly common as international online travel booking grew.
Nam Ngo
September 2026
Nha Trang Motorcycle Tours – VIETNAMRIDER
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