Southeast Asia has spent the past decade cheerfully waving in more tourists than its most iconic landscapes can absorb. Now, slowly and not always gracefully, it is trying to walk some of that back. Vietnam’s contribution is happening in Quang Ninh province, where authorities have overhauled safety and monitoring on Halong Bay after a tourist boat capsized in a squall on 19 July 2025, killing dozens of people. A fire on the Signature Royal cruise ship in February 2026 added more pressure. Both incidents, not spiralling visitor numbers, are why the bay now looks and operates differently.
The measures are extensive. All nearly 500 tourist boats operating in the bay, including overnight cruises, are now required to carry Automatic Identification Systems that let authorities monitor routes, positions and speeds in real time. VHF radios and GPS are mandatory too. The province has added round-the-clock maritime patrols, surprise safety inspections, and early-warning systems for storms and lightning across critical zones of the bay. Departure clearances are only granted once port authorities have verified passenger lists. None of this caps the number of people who can visit. It tightens who can operate a boat and how, which will constrain capacity indirectly even though that isn’t the stated goal.
How many people actually visit is harder to pin down than it should be. Quang Ninh’s own tourism department has cited figures in the 7,000 to 8,000 range for average daily visitors province-wide, and annual totals for the bay itself, around 2.6 to 2.7 million a year in 2023 and 2024, work out to roughly 7,000 to 7,400 a day on average. Numbers climb sharply during Tet and peak summer weeks, sometimes several times over. Anyone quoting a firm daily average for Halong Bay specifically should be able to point to where it came from.
The comparison everyone reaches for is Thailand, and with good reason. Maya Bay on Koh Phi Phi Leh is the cautionary tale that haunts every regional tourism authority. At its busiest before 2018, the bay was taking in several thousand visitors a day and losing coral and beach to the traffic. Thailand’s Department of National Parks closed it, and the closure ran nearly four years before Maya Bay reopened on 1 January 2022 under a very different set of rules. Boats no longer land on the beach. Visitors arrive via a boardwalk from Loh Samah Bay on the back side of the island. A cap of roughly 375 to 380 people is enforced at any one time, visits run about an hour per group, and the bay closes for two months every August and September so the coral can keep recovering. The park fee is 400 THB, around £9, for foreign visitors. Rangers enforce all of it. By most accounts the bay has genuinely recovered: the water is cleaner, the coral is growing back, and blacktip reef sharks have returned to breed. The beach still looks the part. It just isn’t spontaneous anymore.
Thailand’s tourism authority has reframed its broader pitch around quality over volume, aiming for the value visitors generate rather than the raw number of arrivals. That pivot is now being tested by numbers moving the wrong way for reasons that have nothing to do with the pivot itself. Thailand recorded 32.9 million international arrivals in 2025, down 7.23% on 2024 and its first annual decline outside the pandemic years, driven mainly by a Chinese tourist confidence hit after the Wang Xing kidnapping case, the Myanmar earthquake, the Cambodia border dispute, and flooding in the south. None of that undoes the case for quality over volume. It does mean the government now has to defend that strategy while revenue is falling for unrelated reasons, and whether the strategy survives that pressure is worth watching.
For travellers planning Halong Bay right now: book through a licensed operator, expect tighter checks at the port before boarding, and don’t read the usual dockside chaos as a sign the new rules aren’t being enforced behind it. The bay is still worth doing. Overnight cruises for something decent, including meals, run from around £95 to £190 per person. If you want quieter water, Bai Tu Long Bay next door operates with noticeably fewer licensed operators than Halong Bay itself, a deliberate limit on permits rather than a lack of demand, and typical overnight prices sit in the £95 to £400 range depending on the boat. Lan Ha Bay, off Cat Ba Island, is another strong alternative with fewer crowds and the same limestone scenery.
More caps, more fees, more seasonal closures and more advance booking requirements are coming across the region’s most-visited sites. Some will genuinely protect what’s left of these places. Others will be paperwork for its own sake. Either way, if you’re planning a Southeast Asia trip this year, book the boat, the beach slot, or the park permit before you land, not after.
