Where to stay: three classes, named properties
Every price on this site has three columns — Comfortable, Excellent and Exceptional — and the only thing that changes between them is where you sleep. The guide, the driver, the vehicle and the itinerary are identical. This page sets out what each class means in square metres, in location and in service, so that the column you pick is a decision rather than a guess.
Three classes, and what they are not
Comfortable, Excellent and Exceptional are our words, not an industry standard, and they describe the room rather than the trip. A Comfortable trip is not a cut-down version of an Exceptional one. Same guide, same driver, same private vehicle, same schedule, same early start at the Temple of Literature. What differs is the bed at the end of the day, and on a few nights — the bay boat above all — that difference is large enough to account for most of the gap in the price table.
Class is also not a proxy for how much you will enjoy the trip. Plenty of travellers who could afford the top column choose the middle one and put the difference into an extra three days, which is usually the better purchase. The pages that will help you decide are what a Vietnam trip costs and how many days you need.
One structural point before the table. Vietnamese hotel stock is unusually good in the middle: the country has a very large supply of well-run, recently built, twenty-to-forty room hotels that would cost three times as much in Thailand. This means the jump from Comfortable to Excellent buys a great deal, and the jump from Excellent to Exceptional buys mostly space, land and privacy. Knowing that is worth more than any star rating.
The three classes side by side
| What changes | Comfortable | Excellent | Exceptional |
|---|---|---|---|
| Room size, city hotel | About 22–28 m², usually no view | About 30–40 m², a view or a small balcony | 45 m² and up, often a suite or a garden villa |
| Where it stands | A few streets back; five to ten minutes on foot from where you want to be | On the edge of the old centre, or first line back from the beach | On the square, on the sand, or on its own grounds |
| Breakfast | Buffet, mostly Vietnamese, roughly 06:30 to 09:30 | Buffet plus eggs and pho cooked to order, usually to 10:30 | À la carte, served where you like, usually to 11:00 |
| Service | Front desk with working English, one shift, no night manager | English at the desk around the clock, laundry back the same day | A named contact at the property; on beach resorts, a butler by name |
| Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, per room per night | about USD 60–95 | about USD 110–190 | about USD 250–500 |
| Hoi An, Da Nang, Phu Quoc — beach and old town | about USD 55–95 | about USD 130–210 | about USD 300–650 |
| Hue, Ninh Binh, Sa Pa, Mai Chau, Pu Luong | about USD 40–70 | about USD 90–150 | about USD 190–350 |
| Cabin on a bay boat, per cabin per night, full board | about USD 150–230 | about USD 260–400 | about USD 500–950 |
The figures are ranges because the same room moves with the season: a beach room in Hoi An in March and the same room in October are not the same purchase, and Tet moves everything upward for about ten days. Treat the ranges as the band we quote inside, not as a promise about a specific night — the quotation names the property and the exact rate for your dates.
Note that these are room rates, not the per-person figures in the tour price tables. Two people sharing an Excellent room in Hanoi at USD 150 are paying USD 75 each for the bed; the rest of what you see in the price table is the guide, the driver, the vehicle, the entries, the meals listed and our margin.
We name the property. That is the whole point
Every quotation we send lists the hotel for every night, by name, with the room type next to it. You can look it up, read what other people say about it, check where it is on a map, and tell us it is not what you want before you pay anything. If we cannot get the property we named, we say so and offer an alternative by name — we do not silently substitute.
Compare that with the standard phrasing across this industry: "4-star hotel or similar". That sentence cannot be checked by anyone. Vietnam has no single enforced star system that a traveller can audit; ratings come from several sources, some self-declared, and a building rated four stars in 2011 keeps the plaque long after the lifts stop working. "Or similar" then does the real work in that sentence, and it means whatever the operator needs it to mean on the day.
So a quote built on star ratings is a quote you cannot compare with any other quote. If you are weighing us against another company, the single most useful thing you can do is ask both of us for the hotel names. The answers, and how quickly they come, will tell you most of what you need to know. Our booking sequence is set out on how to book.
Where the classes differ most
Two nights on a Vietnam itinerary account for most of the distance between the columns.
The bay boat
A cabin in Ha Long or Lan Ha is the widest gap on any of our trips. At the Comfortable end you are on a steel boat of perhaps twenty cabins, well run, with a window and a shared sun deck, sailing a route shared with a dozen similar boats. At the Exceptional end you are on a wooden boat of six or eight cabins with a private balcony, a different anchorage, and a kayak launch that happens when you ask rather than at 15:30 with everyone else. That is not a nicer version of the same night — it is a different night. If you want to remove the variable altogether, chartering the whole boat puts eight to twelve of you on your own vessel with your own timetable.
The beach resorts
On the coast at Hoi An, Da Nang and Phu Quoc, the classes separate by land. Comfortable means a good room a short walk or a shuttle ride from the sand. Excellent means the resort owns the beach in front of it. Exceptional means space around you: a villa with its own pool, fewer rooms per hundred metres of shoreline, and a restaurant that is not running two sittings. On a honeymoon or a long beach stay this is where the money is best spent, which is why the twelve-day honeymoon route is weighted towards the upper columns on the coastal nights and not elsewhere.
Where the classes barely differ at all
In the countryside the three columns converge, and it is worth knowing that before you pay for the top one. A homestay in Ninh Binh is a family building with six to ten rooms, a garden, and someone’s mother cooking dinner. There is no Exceptional version of that because the thing itself has a ceiling: you can have a bigger room and better bedding, but the experience — the courtyard, the dogs, the food, the limestone behind the house — is identical in all three columns.
The same is true in Pu Luong and Mai Chau, and largely true in Ha Giang, where the best available accommodation in Dong Van and Meo Vac is decent rather than luxurious in any column. On the northern mountain trips we will tell you plainly that upgrading buys you very little, and we would rather say that than take the higher price. Where the countryside night sits inside a longer trip, we often mix the classes: Exceptional in Hanoi and on the boat, Excellent in the mountains, because that is where the money actually works. Ask for a mixed quote — it is not a special request.
One consequence of this convergence: the gap between the price columns on a mostly rural itinerary such as Ninh Binh and Pu Luong is much narrower than on a city-and-coast route, and that narrowness is real rather than a discount.
What we will not book, in any class
There is a short list of properties we decline, and it costs us bookings, so it is worth setting out why.
- Anywhere with a captive wildlife attraction. Elephant rides, bears, caged civets producing coffee for guests, tiger or monkey photographs by the pool. Several resorts in Vietnam still run these and some are otherwise excellent hotels. We do not book them, and if you ask us to, we will explain and decline rather than quietly take the reservation.
- Resorts built on cleared mangrove. On parts of the southern coast and around Phu Quoc, resort land was made by removing mangrove that held the shoreline together. We use properties on ground that was already dry, and where we are not sure about a specific site, we say we are not sure.
- Any hotel whose rate depends on a commission we would have to conceal. Some properties quote us a lower rate on the understanding that a guide brings guests to a partner shop, or that we place a minimum number of nights a month regardless of whether they suit the client. That turns your itinerary into someone else’s sales channel. We pay net rates and add our margin openly.
- Anything we have not seen or cannot get a straight answer about. New openings are the usual case. A hotel that has been taking guests for three weeks is not a safe place to put a client on a trip they have saved two years for, however good the photographs are.
The same principle runs through the itineraries themselves: no shopping stops, no lacquer workshop that pays the driver, no jade showroom disguised as a lavatory break. About us explains how the guides are paid so that this holds in practice rather than only on a web page.
Rooms, beds, and the single supplement
Vietnamese hotels distinguish sharply between a double room with one large bed and a twin room with two singles, and the two are often different room categories at different prices rather than a setting the housekeeper changes. Tell us which you want when you enquire. Requesting a bed configuration on arrival works perhaps half the time in a full hotel and almost never during Tet.
| You need | What is usually available | What to expect |
|---|---|---|
| Double, one large bed | Everywhere | Standard; say so at enquiry, not at check-in |
| Twin, two beds | Everywhere, as a separate category | Book it as a twin from the start; conversion on the day is unreliable |
| Triple, three sharing | Excellent and Exceptional, occasionally Comfortable | Usually a fold-away bed in a larger room, not three real beds |
| Connecting rooms | Excellent and Exceptional in cities and resorts; rare elsewhere | Cannot be guaranteed at any class — we request and confirm three days out |
| Family room or two-bedroom villa | Beach resorts, and some city hotels | The reliable answer for a family of four or five; priced as one unit |
| Single room | Everywhere | A supplement applies — see below. Bay boat cabins are the expensive part |
Solo travellers pay a room supplement rather than a higher tour price, because a room costs what it costs whether one or two people sleep in it. On a four-day northern trip that runs from about USD 210 in the Comfortable column to about USD 640 in the Exceptional one, and the boat cabin accounts for a disproportionate share of it — cabins are sold by the cabin, and a small boat has no single berths to sell. The supplement is shown as its own line in every quotation, never folded into the per-person figure.
Children sharing their parents’ room are usually free below a certain age at each property and charged for breakfast above it, and the age varies by hotel, so we confirm it per property rather than quoting a rule. For families of four we generally price two connecting rooms or a two-bedroom villa and let you choose — the villa is often cheaper and always quieter. The family route is built this way throughout.
Ask for the hotel list before you decide
Send us your dates and the class you are leaning towards, and we will come back with named properties for every night so you can look them up yourself.
Questions travellers ask most
Can we mix the classes across one trip?
Yes, and on longer routes we often suggest it before you ask. The money works hardest on the bay boat and the beach nights and least in the countryside, so a common shape is Exceptional afloat, Excellent in the cities, Comfortable in the mountains.
Say so in your enquiry and the quotation comes back mixed, with the class shown against each night so you can see exactly where the money went.
Why won’t you just tell us the star rating?
Because a star rating in Vietnam is not something you can verify. There is no single enforced system a traveller can audit, some ratings are self-declared, and a plaque awarded a decade ago stays on the wall.
We give you the name of the property instead. A name can be looked up, read about, located on a map and rejected. That is the whole reason we do it that way.
What happens if the hotel you named is not available?
We tell you, and we offer a named alternative in the same class for you to approve before anything is confirmed. Nothing gets substituted quietly, and no quotation from us says "or similar".
If a substitution happens after you have paid — which is rare, and usually an overbooking at the property rather than anything we did — you get the equivalent or better at our cost, and the difference is not invoiced to you.
Do you book homestays, and are they comfortable?
We use them in Ninh Binh, Pu Luong, Mai Chau and parts of the northern mountains, because in those places they are better than the hotel alternative rather than cheaper than it. Expect a private room with a private bathroom, a fan and often air conditioning, and dinner cooked by the family.
Expect also thinner walls, roosters, and hot water that depends on the afternoon sun. If that is not what you want, say so at the enquiry stage and we will use a small hotel instead — it is a straightforward swap.
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