This post contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through them, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Six months into our year of travelling, we noticed something. The kids were having the time of their lives, but every friend they made was a one-day friend. A pool friend in Da Nang, a beach friend in Krabi, gone by morning.
Most of the children they met did not speak English either, so even those friendships took work. Philip and Lillia needed more than us and a rotating cast of holiday mates. Look, we are great company, but we are not eight years old.
That is how we ended up at the Better Together Hub on Phu Quoc, Vietnam. We booked one term, stayed for two, and stopped travelling for four months because of it. Here is our honest review.
Why We Started Looking at Worldschool Hubs
When we pulled the kids out of school to travel, we knew the social side would be the hard bit. Worldschooling seems to be the buzzword now, and plenty of families are considering it as the education system creaks. If you are at that stage yourself, we wrote about how to withdraw your child from school in England.
A worldschool hub, if you have not met the term, is a pop-up community of travelling families in one place, usually with a learning programme for the kids and a social calendar for everyone. In theory it fixes the one-day friend problem overnight.
The Instagram Worldschool Trap
Start searching and you will find no shortage of beautiful reels. Real life lessons, community vibes, loving the Earth, all that good stuff. They all sound wonderful.
Then you enquire, because there is never a price list, only a DM. And what you find is that many of these places are unreasonably expensive. If you have sold the house and you are travelling on savings rather than a laptop salary, most worldschool hubs are an unattainable dream. That is the reality of it, and we assumed it would be the case everywhere.
What Is the Better Together Hub?
Another travelling family recommended Better Together, so we contacted Daniella, who runs it with her husband Fernando and their two children. Their backstory will sound familiar to half the families reading this. Fed up with the nine to five, let down by traditional schooling, so they left to travel the world, and now they run hubs all over it.
The Phu Quoc hub works because of one simple trick. They take over almost the entire hotel. Everyone staying there is part of the hub, which means the kids have free rein. Ours could knock on doors for their friends and roam between the playground and the pool with a dozen parents keeping half an eye out. There were also about ten puppies belonging to the hotel owner, which as far as our two were concerned made it an absolute paradise.
One of roughly ten hotel puppies, unofficial mascots of the hub.
School Days Without the School Run
The hub runs a school programme during the day with a teacher, and you can drop the kids off. After six months of being the teachers, the entertainment and the snack bar, having a few child-free hours was honestly life-changing. We got work done. We drank hot coffee while it was still hot.
The Activities, Deep Breath
Here is what the kids got up to across our two terms. A trip to Phu Quoc’s first chocolate factory. A bee farm visit. A pepper farm visit. Paddleboard competitions, more than one, and hotly contested. A water park day. A taekwondo lesson. Arts and crafts. Film nights. Two pool parties. Karaoke nights that the adults may have enjoyed more than the children.
The big group outings were the best of it. A boat trip where the kids fished off the side and then everyone jumped off the boat, including children who would never have dared without twenty others cheering them on. A waterfall hike. A girls’ night where the mums escaped to a spa. And because we were there over Halloween, trick-or-treating around the hotel.
One night every family cooked their national dish and eight families sat down together. That was not even the hub’s idea, it came from one of the families, which tells you something about the culture Daniella and Fernando encourage. Families and kids are included in deciding what to do and how the days are structured.
Honest note on cost. Most of these extras are not included in the hub price. They organise everything and you pay the cost of the activity itself, which keeps it flexible. You join the things you fancy and skip the ones you do not.
Bean to bar, then straight into their own hot chocolate.
Learning where honey actually comes from, bee farm style.
Night Markets and Grand World With a Crew
Phu Quoc’s night market is great on any night, but it is better with a crew. After months of the four of us wandering markets alone, turning up as a group of families, filling a restaurant table and splitting off to browse was a small joy we did not know we missed.
Better with a crew: the Phu Quoc night market, hub style.
We also did a group trip to Grand World, the mini Venice at the north of the island, complete with a boat ride through the canals. Across the road there is a spectacular free Vietnamese cultural show in the evening. For everything else on the island, our full Phu Quoc family guide covers it, and the world’s longest sea cable car is very much worth your day.
What It Did for Our Kids
We asked our daughter for her favourite thing about the hub. She was too busy looking at the photos to answer, which is a review in itself. The friends were the thing. Proper friends, weeks-long friends, knock-on-the-door friends, not one-day friends.
We watched both kids grow braver by the week. Jumping off a boat into the sea is a different proposition when you are surrounded by other kids doing the same and cheering you on.
Would We Do It Again?
We went from moving country every month to staying in Vietnam for four months, and the Better Together Hub was a large part of that decision. We booked one term and stayed for two. Let that be the testament to how good it was.
We cannot speak highly enough of Daniella and Fernando. If your kids are collecting one-day friends across Asia and you want a community without the Instagram price tag, this is the one we would point you at. They run hubs in multiple countries, with new ones coming all the time, including football-focused hubs. Check their Facebook page for what is coming up.
Better Together runs hubs in different spots around the world, so if this sounds like your kind of thing, their Facebook group is where they post upcoming locations, dates and how to join.
