A Village Before A Destination: What Thai Hai Teaches Tourism About Protecting What Visitors Come To See
Before the first visitor: protect living heritage and regenerate the place
In the early 2000s, Nguyễn Thị Thanh Hải returned to the ATK Định Hóa area and saw traditional Tày stilt houses being dismantled. Local reporting records that she mortgaged property and mobilized resources to acquire land and rescue old stilt houses. Thai Hai therefore did not begin as a tourism product. It began with a decision to protect a living place and a culture at risk of disappearing.
ICRT Global records that 28 original Tày stilt houses were relocated and carefully restored, with more than 30 now preserved and used in everyday life. More importantly, these houses still carry social life: people live, gather, teach, pass on knowledge and welcome guests within them. Culture is not separated from everyday life and repackaged as a scheduled performance. Tày language, customs, rituals, clothing, music, food and handicrafts remain part of community life and continue through intergenerational transmission. ICRT Global emphasizes that Thai Hai preserves culture as everyday practice rather than as performance or exhibition.
Protecting living heritage was followed by regenerating the place that sustains it. ICRT notes that regeneration began on degraded land, first with fast-growing trees to improve the soil and later with native species connected to Tày life. The sequence matters: ecological recovery was treated as part of sustaining the community, not simply as scenery for visitors.
At Thai Hai, conservation is therefore not simply about saving a house or maintaining a ritual. It is about protecting the conditions that allow culture to remain alive. A restored house can become scenery. But when meals, memories, work and intergenerational transmission still take place inside it, the house remains part of a living cultural system. Nature, likewise, is not merely scenery; it is the ecological foundation to be handed on to the future.
Before growth: build shared governance
Once the community had identified what needed to be protected and regenerated, Thai Hai developed a system for living, working and sharing benefits collectively. VnExpress reports that income is placed into a common fund to support food, health care, education and other community needs. ASEAN captures the philosophy in the phrase “One meal we share, one purse we bear”. The lesson is not that other destinations should copy this model literally, but that Thai Hai has clear principles governing how work is organized, how benefits circulate and how collective life is protected.
Its economic model also connects livelihoods with knowledge the community wants to retain. UN Tourism highlights the “one family, one product” approach, through which households develop products rooted in local skills and knowledge.
For tourism practitioners, the lesson lies in the order of decisions. Before asking how to attract more visitors, a destination should ask: who decides, who benefits, what is shared, what should not be commercialized, and who has the authority to say “no” when a profitable activity begins to damage community life? Marketing can create demand. Governance decides whether a destination can survive its own success.
The visitor enters village life - not the other way around
The difference becomes visible in the host-guest relationship. ICRT describes visitors staying in traditional stilt houses, sharing meals, joining farming and food preparation, and learning about traditional health practices through interactions based on real life rather than staged performances.
A destination can become more successful in the market while becoming less itself when growth moves faster than stewardship.
The emphasis is on participation in an existing way of life rather than on a performance designed around visitor expectations. That choice is easy to describe and difficult to protect. Tourism often pushes communities to reorganize daily life around what visitors expect to see. Thai Hai attempts the opposite: the visitor is invited into a rhythm that already has meaning. The guest learns because the host continues to live - not because the host has been turned into a permanent performer.
The 2026 ICRT jury citation reports approximately 50,000 visitors a year and about 90% arriving through personal recommendations rather than formal marketing. Whether those figures rise or fall in future years, the strategic point is more important than the number: strong word of mouth is a result of an experience people find meaningful, not simply of promotional reach.
Awards came after the hard work
External recognition has followed. Thai Hai received two ASEAN tourism awards — the ASEAN Sustainable Tourism Standard Award in 2018 and an ASEAN Homestay Award in 2025 — was named one of UN Tourism's Best Tourism Villages 2022, and won Gold for Championing Cultural Diversity at the 2026 ICRT Southeast Asia Responsible Tourism Awards.
Recognition is valuable, but it is not harmless. Awards bring visibility; visibility brings demand; demand brings pressure to standardize, commercialize and expand. The next test for Thai Hai is therefore the same one facing every successful community destination: can recognition continue to serve the place, or will the place gradually begin to serve recognition?
Thai Hai's transferable lesson is an order of decisions: protect what must endure, regenerate the place, govern together, and only then let tourism and recognition grow.
The question Thai Hai leaves with us
Thai Hai’s most important contribution to responsible tourism is not the idea that every village should live as one family. It is a different order of priorities: tourism comes after the work of keeping a place worth living in. The houses matter because people still live in them. The songs matter because another generation is still learning them. The forest matters because it is treated as something borrowed from the future. Tourism matters when it sustains that living system rather than replacing it.
The practical lesson begins with a different first question. Do not ask, “What can we sell here?” Ask, “What must still be alive here twenty years from now?” The strongest destinations are not those that turn community life into a product, but those that use tourism to help that life endure. The most dangerous moment for a destination may not be when nobody comes. It may be when everyone wants to come — and the community has not yet decided what it refuses to lose.
