Zen Villas

The experience

A traditional Vietnamese massage house occupying a villa of more than 5,000 square metres on Trần Khánh Dư, in the quiet grid behind the Hanoi Opera House. Inside are over a hundred treatment rooms plus steam rooms and air-bubble pools, done out in bamboo motifs and metal screens rather than hotel-spa marble. The massage menu is tiered — Zen 1, Silver, Gold, Ruby and Diamond, with Zen Platinum and Zen Focus for deep work on neck and shoulders. Every treatment ends at a self-service buffet of more than twenty dishes.

A Vietnamese massage institution the size of a hotel, on a street no visitor has any reason to walk down.

What a membership adds.

Everything above is free: the name, the photo, the rating, the exact spot. What members get is the part you can't Google: the sourced insider tip for this place (what to order, when to go, what to skip), every day of your trips unlocked in full with the insider tip on every researched stop, and the concierge at full strength, answering with your own insider tips, no daily meter.