How to book, step by step

From your first message to the name board

Nothing here is unusual, but the timings are the part nobody publishes, so here they are. Our office runs 08:30 to 18:00 Monday to Saturday, Vietnam time, which is GMT+7 — seven hours ahead of London in winter, twelve ahead of New York, two behind Sydney.

1. You write to us. Ten minutes of your time. The useful message contains four things: your dates or the month, how many of you and their ages, roughly what you want to see, and the budget you have in mind. The last one saves the most time and is the one people leave out. We reply within one working day.
2. We ask questions, or we call. Half an hour, by email or on a call at an hour that suits your time zone. This is where a trip stops being a template. If you would rather not talk, say so and we will do it all in writing.
3. First draft itinerary and price. Two to three working days. It arrives as a day-by-day with drive times, named hotels, a price grid for your actual party size, and a list of what we deliberately left out.
4. You change it. Most trips settle in two or three rounds over three to ten days. Changing hotels, dropping a flight, adding a night, moving the pace — all normal, none of it charged for.
5. We hold space. Once you are close, we can hold hotel rooms and a bay cabin for five to seven working days without any payment. Over Tet, Christmas and New Year that shortens to about 48 hours, because the boats and the good rooms move fast.
6. Confirmation and invoice. Same day you say yes. The invoice states the total, the 25 per cent deposit, the date the balance falls due, and the cancellation terms in full. Read the day-by-day attached to it: that document, not the emails, is what we are contracted to deliver.
7. You pay the deposit. 25 per cent, due within five working days of the invoice. Clearing time depends on how you pay — see the table below.
8. We contract the suppliers. Within two working days of the deposit clearing. You then get the confirmation numbers: hotel names, room categories, the boat’s name and its cabin count, and any internal flights we are holding.
9. The balance. Due 35 days before your arrival date. We invoice at 45 days so nothing is a surprise, and we send one reminder. If you are booking inside 35 days, the whole amount is payable at confirmation.
10. Final documents, then arrival. Ten to fourteen days out you receive the final pack: your guide’s and driver’s names and mobile numbers, pick-up times, flight timings, the 24-hour operations line, and what to do if a flight is late. On the day, someone is inside the arrivals hall with a name board, not outside the barrier.

The money, in plain figures

Two payments, no third. A deposit of 25 per cent of the trip price confirms the booking and is what we use to contract hotels, boats and internal flights. The balance is due 35 days before your arrival date. Booking inside 35 days is fine and common; it simply means one payment instead of two.

One thing worth noticing before you commit: the balance falls due on the same day the cancellation ladder steps up to 50 per cent. That is not a coincidence, and it is not a trap either — it is the day our own suppliers stop refunding us. If you are unsure about your dates, the decision point is 36 days out, not the day you pay.

The card fee is passed through at cost and shown on its own line; we do not fold it into the trip price and we do not add anything to it. On a USD 4,000 trip the 25 per cent deposit is USD 1,000, so paying by card costs USD 34 more than a transfer and lands instantly, while a SWIFT transfer costs you your own bank’s USD 15 to 40 and takes one to three working days. For a deposit under USD 3,000, Wise is usually cheaper than both. Full detail, including what the invoice looks like, is on how to pay.

If you cancel

The ladder below is the whole of it and it is on your invoice. It is built around when our own suppliers stop refunding us, which is why it steps where it does.

Two notes on the top and bottom rows. At more than 60 days we itemise what has already been committed rather than keeping a flat fee — usually that is nothing, occasionally it is a non-refundable domestic flight or a Tet deposit on a boat, and either way you see the supplier’s own invoice. At seven days or fewer we still return the parts nobody has consumed: unused airport taxes on internal flights, and any government fee that can be reclaimed. It is a small amount and we return it anyway.

If we cancel — which we have to do occasionally when a typhoon closes the bay or a road slides — you get the choice of a full refund of the unused portion or a rescheduled trip at the same price. The full wording, including what happens to a partly-used trip, is on booking terms. Travel insurance is where the rest of this risk belongs, which is why we require it.

How we will and will not ask you for money

Payment redirection fraud is the one real danger in booking a trip by email, and it works because the criminal reads a genuine thread and copies its tone. The defence is boring and it works: know in advance what we will never do.

• We never change bank details by email. Not by an email that looks like ours, not with an apology about an account being audited, not in a revised PDF invoice, not from a personal address of somebody with our name on it. If a message tells you our account has changed, it did not come from us.
• Confirm by voice, on a number you already have. Before any first payment, and before any payment where anything at all looks different, ring the number on our website or on the invoice you were originally sent. Never ring a number that arrived in the same email as the new details — that number belongs to the person who wrote it.
• The account name matches the company name. Our beneficiary name is our registered company name. It is never a person, never a trading name you have not seen, never an account in a country your trip does not touch. If the name on the transfer screen does not match the name on the invoice, stop.
• We never ask for payment by gift card, cryptocurrency, a money transfer service to a named individual, or cash on arrival. There is no exception, no urgent circumstance and no discount that changes this.
• We never ask for your card number in an email or on the phone. Cards go through the payment link only, on a page whose address you can read.
• Nothing is ever urgent enough to skip a check. If a message pressures you to pay within the hour or lose the boat, that pressure is the fraud. A genuine hold from us lasts days, and we would rather lose the cabin than have you lose the money.

What we need from you, and when

We keep those documents for as long as we have to and no longer, and we do not sell or share them. If you would rather send the passport page by an encrypted link than by email, ask and we will send one. Anything still unclear, put it to us before you pay anything — contact us — and read what a private trip costs if you want to see the supplier rates behind the number on your invoice.

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