While most of the inhabitants live in the city center, others reside in the four urban coastal wards, extending from Suối Nước beach in the northeast towards cape Kê Gà in the southwest.

In 1898 (the 10th year of the reign of Emperor Thành Thái), Bình Thuận's provincial capital was moved to Phú Tài village, a suburb of Phan Thiết.

Congestion on the roads along the coastline is seldom, allowing for physical activities such as walking or riding to experience fewer difficulties in regards to noise pollution.

Phan Thiết houses many restaurants, museums, and shopping malls along with the school where Hồ Chí Minh served as a teacher prior to studying in Paris.

The so-called “Fairy Stream” is considered one of the great tourist attractions of Hàm Tiến, where a small creek carves a canyon through the dunes, revealing colorful layers of sand and limestone.

In the Summer season, Phan Thiết is a popular destination for Australian and North American tourists, as well as many locals seeking fresh sea wind breezes.

Phan Thiết has a relatively dry tropical savanna climate (Köppen Aw) with the wet season occurring from May to mid-November, which is more typical of Southeastern Vietnam than of the Central Coast.

Because the northeast trade winds from the distant Siberian High run parallel to the coast, unlike further north in cities like Da Nang and Huế, the northern winter is typically dry as for most of Indochina or South and East Asia.

[citation needed] During the Vietnam War, Phan Thiết was the site of the U.S. military base known as Landing Zone Betty, which was located at the now closed airfield southwest of the city.

24 October 1995 is considered to be the birth of tourism in Phan Thiết, when thousands visited Mũi Né to witness the total solar eclipse.

Local people in Phan Thiết regularly practice a ceremony to a whale god, which is believed to provide good luck in nautical pursuits.