Peter Ryder first had the idea for Wink Hotels in a café in Marsala, Sicily, in 2014. He was not in Vietnam. He was not in a hotel. He was sitting somewhere improbably far from both – which undoubtedly helped. There, he thought about what Vietnamese hospitality could look like if someone built it from a clean sheet of paper.
The answer – after seven years, a pandemic, one legendary pajama party, and a Hyatt partnership – turned out to be 43,824 hours of something people keep describing with the same word: a vibe.
A Clean Sheet Of Paper
The distance from a hotel probably helped. Sitting somewhere improbably far from both Vietnam and the business he was about to build, Peter saw the market plainly. You paid for a five-star hotel, or you accepted whatever sat beneath it. The middle ground – a great product, a great location, a real experience, all at a price almost anyone could afford – was empty. “I definitely saw a big opportunity to fill it,” he remembers.
Two conditions anchored everything. Make it uniquely Vietnamese. Make it design-led. Not design-adjacent, not design-inflected – design as a non-negotiable. “I wanted new forms. I wanted a lot of color. I wanted local artwork throughout the property.” Those three sentences describe exactly what you walk into at Wink Saigon Centre, the flagship that opened in March 2021.
The Biggest Living Room In Town
Three things hit you first, Peter explains: the art, an architectural feature wall that echoes the shophouses along Ham Nghi and Pasteur a couple of kilometres away, and the bird cage lights. What you do not find is a reception desk. “And that makes me comfortable,” he smiles. The space has a name – the Wink Space – and a description he likes better: the biggest living room in town.
David Keen, founder of Quo, the agency behind Wink’s original brand identity, remembers the early conversations about what that living room was supposed to feel like. Vietnam in 2019 was at an inflection point. Forty percent of a 92-million population was under 24, industrial growth was accelerating, and the residual weight of the war era had finally lifted. “Vietnam was coming of age,” David says. “The definition of what we took to calling Indochine 2.0.” The brief was to work out what hospitality looked like for the generation that wanted to experience a city, not be processed by a hotel.
Validating The Idea
CEO Michael Piro sharpened the philosophy into something deceptively simple: strip everything back to what a guest actually needs, then add what traditional hotels consistently fail to deliver. No room number checks at breakfast. No waiting until 3pm to check in. Staff are called guides, not hotel staff, and their job is to point you to the coffee shop that isn’t on TripAdvisor, the gallery and the midnight pig brain soup. “It’s down the street, a few blocks over Tan Dinh Market,” Michael explains, living the location obsession personally.
The launch landed in March 2021, which by any conventional measure was a disaster. COVID had gutted Vietnamese tourism. The opening party was scrapped and rebuilt at two weeks’ notice as a pajama party, ending in a pillow fight that left feathers across the lobby thick like snow. Traditional hoteliers told Michael that’s not how it’s done in Vietnam. He heard all of it. “My first instinct,” he says, “was: thank you. You just validated my idea.”
What 43,824 Hours Feels Like
The team that opened the first Wink had, in many cases, never worked in a hotel. That was the point. Michael didn’t want people who came to work for a hotel – he wanted people who came to work for Wink. Tuyen, now five-plus years into her tenure on the security team, remembers everyone cleaning rooms together before the official opening, security helping housekeeping move furniture. “Nobody drew lines,” she says. “Everyone pitched in. And they still do.”
Su, a housekeeping coach at the flagship, struggles to translate five years into 43,824 hours. “Normally you don’t count the hours, so you don’t notice,” he reflects. “But hearing it now, I’m struck by how fast time has flown.” He remembers guests who couldn’t crack the laundromat on the M floor – and the days he couldn’t either, the two of them laughing while he frantically tried to get it running. It says more about Wink than any brand pillar document could.
Be Brave. Don’t Dilute.
David Keen frames his whole relationship with the brand through people rather than spaces. Not the architecture, not the leadership – the guy behind the bar with the long ponytail. “I engaged with him. That’s how I remember this place. As a consumer.” That bartender has since left to train as a sake sommelier at one of Saigon’s best Japanese restaurants. The memory stayed.
The original brief was two words: be brave. “As soon as you compromise, the essence of the brand gradually disappears,” David says. Holding that line through a pandemic, a recovery and rapid expansion is the third brand pillar – tenacity – and the hardest to keep. “Unless you’re tenacious, unless you hold it up, it’s gone,” he argues. “But at Wink the vibe is there. And you’ve held it.”
The Vibe Is Still There
The Hyatt partnership, announced in December 2025, folded six operating Wink properties into the Unscripted by Hyatt portfolio, with Wink Hanoi West Lake arriving in Q4 2026. It is also Unscripted’s global debut – Wink is the brand’s first expression anywhere in the world.
Michael’s favorite ritual hasn’t changed. Most mornings at the flagship, where he stays most weeks, he sits alone at breakfast and watches staff anticipate needs before they’re spoken, cover for each other, cross the lobby because someone needs a door. Ten people servicing a hundred. “I saw it in my dreams,” he says. “And now I see it in our hotels.” Six properties open. A seventh on the way. 2,000 rooms, from Can Tho up through Saigon, Tuy Hoa, Da Nang, Hai Phong and finally Hanoi. All of it in five years, through a pandemic, in a market that had no category for what they were building.
Someone, somewhere along the way, said Wink was a vibe. Peter thought: that’s exactly what we were aiming for. The feathers have long since been swept up. The vibe is still there.
