When you step off the boat and onto Song Saa Private Island’s powdery shore, you’ll notice a unique soundtrack. It consists of the clack, clack, clack of palm fronds, faint laughter on tropical breezes and maybe even the reverberations of a gong heard for a moment over the waves. For us, this is the sound of people and the planet coexisting in harmony.
When we fell in love with the degraded island that would become Song Saa in 2006, our initial plan was to restore its coral-rich waters purely for the love of it. However, we realised that we could harness the power of luxury tourism to create something that was more than a private island resort. Cambodia’s coastal beauty became the backdrop for a sanctuary where Mother Nature is an active partner.
Song Saa is Cambodia’s leading sustainable luxury hotel, designed with deep respect for the Koh Rong Archipelago and communities who live there. Every choice from the reclaimed timber in our 24 villas to the seasonal ingredients that define our menu, reflects our commitment to care for this special place.
We’re proud to embrace conscious travel through: biophilic design and guest adventures inspired by the work of the Song Saa Foundation; campaigning to create Cambodia’s first Marine Protected Area; viewing our interiors as a gallery for traditional artisans and weaving saraan (‘love’ in Khmer) into every moment of our guest’s stay.
Whether you seek rest, reconnection or a more meaningful way to travel, the Song Saa team invites you to soften into something quietly extraordinary – an eco island retreat where Nature herself becomes your guide.
‘Sustainable travel’ is a buzzword that's cropping up like mushrooms across everything from Instagram to airline websites. For us, a sustainable luxury hotel in Cambodia doesn’t just reduce harm. It honours the land, uplifts communities and creates experiences that linger in guests’ hearts – and crucially inspires behaviour change – long after they return home.
From removing plastic straws to asking people to reuse towels, sustainability often becomes a checklist of token gestures. But we believe it should be the North Star that guides every aspect of a hotel’s operations.
At Song Saa, we offer a private island resort experience that is joyful, indulgent and intentional. We know that today’s travellers want experiences grounded in ethics so that their children’s children can also float over psychedelic reefs and see whales breaching on the horizon.
That’s why our luxury eco resort is Bcorp certified and plays a key role in funding the Song Saa Foundation (more on that later). Whether you’re exploring eco island retreats for the first time or are years into your journey of more conscious travel, choosing a genuinely sustainable hotel aligns pleasure with purpose. We don’t think that’s too much to ask.
As a sustainable luxury hotel in Cambodia we take pride in stewarding our land but our real goal is regeneration i.e. leaving it even better than we found it.
Through our independent non-profit, the Song Saa Foundation, we invest in education, clean water and habitat protection for the communities beyond our shores. So far, our team has contributed 6,000 hours of volunteering time in everything from mangrove restoration to beach cleans.
Our interiors, thoughtfully designed by our founder Melita Koulmandas, incorporate upcycled treasures and the finest Cambodian craftsmanship, while menus spotlight local ingredients that nourish both body and planet. Song Saa isn’t just a retreat from the world, it’s a vision of what a luxury eco resort can be: a place that gives more than it takes where guests are active participants.
While dreaming up our private island resort in Cambodia, we knew we wanted to create a sanctuary where barefoot luxury met bold environmental stewardship.
What sets us apart? We were Koh Rong’s first – and remain its leading – sustainable luxury hotel. Long before ‘eco’ was a trend, we were already working with local communities to set up the archipelago's first recycling plant and bring education to much-marginalised communities.
This is conscious travel, Cambodian style. Through attentive care, our passionate Khmer team embodies the hospitality that is an innate part of Cambodian culture. When they arrive, we hope our guests can sense that this eco island retreat is a living system of which they are a valued part.
At our luxury eco resort, sustainability isn’t a sacrifice: the proximity of nature is the very thing that gently invites your parasympathetic nervous system into a state of deep rest. Our villas feel earthy, organic and utterly luxurious. Whether sunning yourself on a deck made from reclaimed timber or lounging on handwoven textiles, every detail is tread lightly on the Earth.
Song Saa has evolved beyond a sustainable luxury hotel in Cambodia to become a regenerative haven, where your stay supports environmental restoration, cultural preservation and community empowerment. This isn’t just an eco island retreat. It’s a sensory, soulful encounter with what travel has the potential to be, and one that we hope can become a blueprint for hotels throughout Southeast Asia.
Wellbeing at Song Saa offers the chance to reconnect with our highest selves, nature’s rhythms and each other. Our eco island retreat invites you to measure your days by how many wild orchids you spot on your morning walk and how thickly the bioluminescence gathers in the boat’s wake after sunset.
Our wellbeing offering is as diverse as Cambodia’s flora, incorporating everything from personal training to warm compresses based on home-grown plants, a treatment locals have sworn by for centuries.
As a sustainable luxury hotel in Cambodia, we also celebrate the country’s intangible heritage through blessings performed by Buddhist monks, either in your favourite spot or in the Prek Svay temple.
Our Saraan Sanctuaries – radically raw treatment spaces on the island’s shore or nestled in its canopy – allow you to feel truly immersed in the rhythms of nature. We invite you to come as you are and allow the island to hold you.
From flame-licked seafood to peppery wild herbs, menus at Song Saa are a love letter to Cambodia’s natural larder and the rural communities who continue to safeguard recipes through the generations.
Chef Bunseng Ing leads our kitchen with both passion and precision. His journey – from a small village to representing Song Saa recently at a global zero-waste culinary residency in Portugal – embodies our kitchen’s evolution: rooted in Khmer heritage and informed by global inspiration.
In keeping with our values as an eco island retreat, we source the majority of our ingredients from small-scale Cambodian suppliers. Take Three Corner Coffee, the talent behind the Song Saa coffee blend, which works with beans grown by the Khmer Loeu hill tribes in the north-east of the country.
We see food as the thread that connects guests with the land multiple times a day, which is why we make sure there are plenty of opportunities to try farm-to-table products such as Kampot Cheese while staying at our sustainable luxury hotel in Cambodia. We also offer an immersive dining programme, with dinner served in a different location around the island every evening.
Song Saa is not just a luxury eco resort but a living experiment in what regenerative hospitality can look like. Ultimately, the Song Saa Foundation is what gets us out of bed every morning. While our guests enjoy an overwater breakfast at Vista, the flagship restaurant at our private island resort in Cambodia, our foundation team has already been up for hours preparing frames in our coral nursery.
Between 2005 and 2007 we worked with the local community to establish Cambodia’s first Marine Protected Area and our team recently documented rare coral spawning events – living proof of the power of regenerative stewardship.
On land, we have protection and restoration programmes in place for mangroves and rainforest systems, an ongoing solid waste management project in Prek Svay and various programmes to equip locals for a climate-resilient future, including rainwater harvesting systems.
For us, local people are at the heart of conscious travel. Guests are invited to join our Boat of Hope missions, which see our team deliver key medical and educational supplies throughout the Koh Rong Archipelago, as well as participate in beach cleans and other hands-on conservation activities.
Whether seeking seclusion or connection, spa rituals or barefoot adventures, our private island resort in Cambodia offers a soulful sanctuary. Our 24-thatched villas with private plunge pools combine sustainable style with privacy, peace and proximity to pristine nature.
Throw in world-class dining, nature-led wellbeing and access to Cambodia’s most biodiverse marine habitat and you’ll see why we have been recognised on Conde Nast Traveller’s gold list so many times.
Check our availability or contact the team today. We’re excited to welcome you home.
