One of the most common topics on the Tripadvisor Vietnam forum is the visa on arrival (VOA) process in Vietnam, an increasingly popular way of getting a Vietnamese visa. There seems to be a lot of conflicting information and confusion on this relatively simple topic, so here’s a quick, simple FAQ on the subject!
Does Vietnam offer visa on arrival?
Kind of. It’s not really a genuine VOA process as operated in Cambodia or Laos, where you simply turn up, hand over paperwork & cash, & get your visa. You need to apply for an authorisation letter in advance (most local tour operators, ourselves included, offer this service for a small fee usually ranging from US$10-15 per person) which you then present at the visa on arrival desk when you land.
How do I apply for visa on arrival?
Once you’ve found a tour operator who provides the service, you need to send them 3 things:
A scan of your passports (the page with the photo and issue details)
Your arrival flight details
Processing fee (if you’re booking a minimum 7-day tour with us, we process VOA for free)
The tour operator will then send you an authorisation letter, which you present on arrival at Hanoi or HCMC airport, along with US$25 (single entry) or US$50 (multi-entry) and 2 passport photos.
What types of visa are available?
You can obtain 30-day single or multi-entry tourist visas, or 3-month business visas on arrival. If you are planning to stay longer, you will need to obtain one of these basic visa types first and then apply for an extension from within Vietnam. This is a far thornier topic altogether and one that has already been extensively discussed elsewhere!
What are the advantages of doing visa on arrival?
The main advantage is that it’s cheaper than going via the Vietnamese embassy in your own country (sometimes as much as 50% cheaper), and it’s also less hassle - having once spent hours queuing up at the Vietnamese embassy in London, I speak from experience!
Are there any disadvantages?
The big disadvantage is that the VOA desk, particularly at HCMC airport, is pretty chaotic with no orderly queue, and can be stressful after a long flight when you just want to get to your hotel. Waiting times can also be quite long if the airport is busy, and with VOA growing in popularity, they are getting longer. Last time I did it it took around 15 minutes, but some guests of ours had an horrendous 2-hour wait just before Christmas when they got stuck behind a group of 40 Russians.
The other disadvantage is that some airline check-in staff in foreign countries are not aware that Vietnam does VOA. I once spent 30 minutes at a check-in desk at Heathrow convincing the staff that my VOA letter was valid to get me into the country - they were trying to charge me for a return or onward flight from Vietnam as they claimed I had no visa. This was in 2005, but I had a similar “discussion” with check-in staff at Heathrow in November last year. Maybe it’s just Heathrow, which wouldn’t surprise me…
Can I do visa on arrival at land borders?
No - it’s only available at international airports, so if you’re coming into Vietnam by land from Cambodia, Laos or China, you’ll need to apply for your visa in advance.
When will Vietnam offer a real visa on arrival process?
The sooner the better in my opinion - it would have a dramatic effect on tourism and would open up the country to whole new markets. But don’t hold your breath…
Just in time for the Tet holiday, the 62km Trung Luong Highway, which links HCMC to My Tho, opened last week. Well, most of it did - the section linking Binh Chanh district to the east-west highway is still a building site, but nevertheless the section that is finished is very impressive and has already shaved a good 30 minutes off the usual journey time.
This means visitors to the Delta can be in My Tho, Cai Be or Ben Tre in just over an hour & a half instead of the usual 2+ hours, and of course it also means that journey times to the likes of Tra Vinh, Sa Dec & Can Tho are also shorter.
On this blog I often bemoan the complete lack of market research conducted into the preferences of overseas visitors to Vietnam, an omission which results in a complete lack of understanding of the desires and needs of tourist visitors to Vietnam.
Tourists seeking the authentic traditions of Vietnam’s Tet Lunar New Festival are expected to help tourism outfits in the central province of Binh Thuan weather the economic downturn after a slow year, experts said.
Le Ngoc Ha, vice chairman of Binh Thuan Tourism Association, said many tourists were traveling to avoid the winter in their home countries and to see and enjoy a vibrant Vietnamese Tet.
The celebrating programs have already included a banh chung (traditional
Better than the beach
square rice cakes) making contest for foreign tourists at Seahorse Resort in Mui Ne.
I doubt very much that many of these tourists were even aware of the existence of Tet when they booked their trips - if they had been, they would probably have avoided travelling to Vietnam at this time of year. Any tourists coming to Vietnam specifically to experience Tet would almost certainly go to Hanoi, Saigon, Hoi An or Hue, all cities with considerable Tet-related activity - after all, a contemporary beach resort is hardly the place to experience traditional customs.
Many of the tourists filling Mui Ne’s beach resorts next week are in fact Saigon-based expats, keen to avoid the hysteria that envelopes the city at this time of year and get some peace & quiet instead. Were I not so busy in the office, I’d be joining them!
I woke up this morning to find that Google Buzz had landed in my inbox. After spending half the morning playing around with it, it would seem to be a hybrid of the Facebook status update and Twitter, combining the best bits of both, and leaving out the worst (ie no character limit, and no Farmville updates). It’s certainly a more impressive first day than Google Wave.
But I’ve noticed it’s currently missing a few features that would make it even more useful:
1. Integration with Twitter & Facebook
Goes without saying this one - I don’t want to have to post a link or update my status in 2 different interfaces. And being able to display selected Facebook & Twitter updates in Google Buzz would be great from a business perspective - most of our customers don’t use Twitter, and I have a policy of not befriending customers on Facebook (my postings aren’t always good for business!), but nearly all of them have Gmail accounts, so Buzz is potentially a great way of talking to our customer base.
2. Integration with Third Party Apps
Twitter’s amazing growth in the last couple of years has largely been down to the huge number of developer apps (such as Tweetdeck, which I use), enabling people to tweet from multiple accounts, add photos and integrate Twitter with other social media sites such as Facebook & Friendfeed, all from one interface. Does anybody actually go to twitter.com any more?
Hopefully it won’t be long before I can update Buzz via Tweetdeck.
3. Auto-follow
I have several hundred contacts in my Gmail address book - it would be nice if I had an option of just following all of them and then unfollowing those I don’t want to see, rather than having to trawl through them all and add individuals. It would also be useful to auto-follow any new contacts that are added, and to import followees from Facebook, Twitter & Yahoo Mail. Maybe this is already possible, but if it is, Google haven’t made it very obvious!
4. Google Earth/Maps integration
Particularly useful from a tour operator point of view, being able to add a Google Earth/Maps reference/snapshot of whatever destination I happen to be talking about, without having to log into Maps/Earth in a separate screen & do a copy/paste job.
5. Integration with Google Translate
…for when Thomas Wanhoff posts status updates in German! But seriously, automatic status translation would be a real boon and would allow me to follow a lot more people, and would also allow my postings to be read by many others. We also sell to the French market, and I don’t have time to write each update out in two languages.
Had an email from this week from someone wanting to do an individual 4-day tour of the Mekong Delta, so we replied with a detailed itinerary and costing. The reply was “This is too expensive for me. I am a travel writer writing a travel guide to Vietnam for women travellers. As such it would be good for you to offer me a heavily discounted or free trip.”
Good for us, or good for you? A few hundred dollars off our bottom line in return for a no doubt brief mention in a travel guide hardly anyone will read? I think not!
In 2010, the notion that travel writers should get special treatment is somewhat passe. These days, EVERY traveller is a potential travel writer, and so every traveller should get special treatment, at least as far as we’re concerned. The rise of travel blogs, peer-to-peer review sites such as Tripadvisor and Fodor’s, and travel forums such as Tripadvisor, Travelfish and Thorn Tree, means that anyone who travels can write about it and, in many cases, get a lot of eyeballs. It’s also led to a sea change in where people get their travel information - people no longer trust journalists writing puff pieces about hotels who’ve given them a free stay in return for some publicity, they want to read real reviews and real experiences by real travellers.
The famous Cluetrain Manifesto, published in 1999, made the following statements about shifts in marketing created by the growth of the internet:
The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.
People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors.
There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
Very prescient stuff, and definitely true of travellers in 2010. So why give travel writers special treatment when your next booking could be from a travelling member of the general public whose blogs, reviews or forum postings might carry a lot more weight than those of a journalist or guide writer?
As a regular business traveller, I am often amazed at the simple things that hotels – even luxury ones – get totally wrong. I’m not a particularly demanding guest – I don’t want a private butler, free champagne or pillows stuffed with down plucked by hand from the backs of rare species of swan. But there are some basic things that hotels consistently get wrong, things that would cost little or nothing to put right. Here are my top 6:
Smiles
This is the easiest one to fix, and the most common one that hotels get wrong. Is a smile on checking in really too much to ask? A smiling doorman and receptionist gets the guest’s stay off to a great start, and it’s even better when staff learn the guest’s name and use it. I once stayed at a small hotel in Phu Quoc where all the staff learned my name on arrival and used it every time they saw me during the 4 days I was there. It made me feel like a VIP and I have recommended the place to countless people since.
Free Internet
Nothing earns a hotel a place on my sh*tlist quicker than charging me to use the internet in my room or in the lobby. I don’t care about the restrictive contract you signed with your ISP 5 years ago, it’s 2010 – I can get free wifi in the café next door or the pub round the corner. I’m paying you $100+ for a room and travelling on business – why should I pack up my laptop and go outside just to check my emails?
A Dry Bathroom Floor
We’ve put a man on the moon. We’ve sent robots to Mars. We’ve got matchbox-
sized devices that can hold our entire record collections. Why can’t we get shower curtains that actually fit properly?
A Half-Decent Breakfast
Not usually an issue in Europe, but a BIG problem in Asia, where even 5* hotels struggle to serve up a passable brekkie. If you can’t get decent bacon or sausage, don’t bother serving half-arsed local versions (and for god’s sake, ditch the chicken sausage! It is an abomination, a crime against gastronomy). If you want to know what decent sausage & bacon look like, go to any guesthouse in Ireland or Scotland and they’ll show you. And try getting some toasters that don’t take 10 minutes to give bread a mild tan.
Affordable Mini-bars
American comedian Rich Hall once opined “A hotel mini-bar allows you to see into the future and what a can of Pepsi will cost in 2020″. Mini-bar prices generally range from merely exorbitant to downright offensive, and the fact that hotels have now started slapping non-removable stickers on the contents to stop you swilling them and then replacing them from the 7-11 next door just adds insult to injury. Cut mini-bar prices and you may just sell a few more cans of beer. And after I’ve just handed over $500 for my stay, do you really need to keep me hanging around a further 10 minutes just in case I end up leaving without paying for the one can of Coke I drank?
Proper Coathangers
Ah, the 2-piece wooden coathanger. You trust me enough to take my $100+ per night and let me stay in one of your rooms, but not enough to trust me not to run off with your coathangers. Yes, the bottom half of a 2-piece coathanger is useless to me on its own, but one day I might just decide that the top half is similarly useless to you and steal it anyway, just for a laugh. Plastic or metal coathangers cost next to nothing these days, so use them – my case is full already, I’m not going to steal them. Promise.
The first thing we notice when we arrive in Laos is the smiles. Even immigration and customs officials seem genuinely pleased to see us, and it’s a feeling that will be repeated countless times during our 1-week visit.
We kick off our Laos trip in the capital, Vientiane. Whilst it’s an entry point for many visitors, local hoteliers tell me that the opening of the Hanoi-Luang Prabang route has killed off a lot of tourism to the capital as most package tourists head straight for Luang Prabang. This is a real shame as, whilst Vientiane doesn’t have many landmark attractions as such, it’s a charming place and a lovely city to while away a few days simply wandering or idling.
And that’s what I do for most of my time there (or anywhere for that matter!). Once we’ve visited the city’s main sights – the gorgeous golden temple of That Louang, the beautiful 19th century Wat Sisaket, and the bustling food market – I spend a happy couple of afternoons just wandering around the quiet streets, enjoying the lack of traffic and hassle, occasionally nipping into a temple for a rest, and discovering the shady banks of the Mekong, lined with small bars & restaurants. There are few better ways to spend the evening than a quick sundowner at the friendly Scottish-run Highlands Bar, enjoying a cold Beer Lao and watching the sunset, before ambling up to Kong View to enjoy contemporary Lao and Thai food in stylish surroundings, with the lights of Thailand on the opposite bank reflecting in the water.
In short, Vientiane is compact, peaceful, undeveloped and friendly – everything I like in a city. Sadly I can’t spend any more time relaxing there as it is soon time to move onto Xieng Khouang and the famous Plain of Jars.
Walking out of Xieng Khouang’s tiny airport I feel like I’m in Africa – the wide plain of parched grass with the occasional tree sticking up looks just like the South African veldt, and the small shacks that line the airport approach road reinforce this feeling.
We are met by the wonderful Mr Yeng, our H’mong guide, who will be with us for the next 4 days and who turns out to be the most helpful and amiable travelling companion one could wish for. He begins our visit by telling us the various theories about how the Plain of Jars came about (and none of them, unusually for this part of the world, involve dragons), and then we wander amongst the ancient jars, the plain pitted by bomb craters from the American War (sidenote – Laos is the most bombed country on Earth and to this day, over 300 people per year are killed by unexploded ordnance. A sickening statistic for such a peaceful, friendly and inoffensive country).
The Plain of Jars may be one of Laos’s ‘marquee’ attractions, but to be honest it’s a tad underwhelming – certainly if you’ve visited mysterious ancient sites such as Stonehenge, Carnac or Macchu Picchu, it has little to justify such a long journey in itself.
However, away from the Plain of Jars, Xieng Khouang has plenty of interest, including the ancient capital of Muang Khoun, destroyed during the war apart from its 15th-century stupa and its huge Buddha statue, and several H’mong hilltribe villages.
We spend the night at the wonderful Auberge Plaine des Jarres, a lodge situated on Phuophadeng Mountain, overlooking the town of Phonsavane. It’s a wonderful spot, with log cabins & wood fires, and a terrific French restaurant attached. Breakfast is taken in front of a huge picture window where we eat fresh eggs & bread by the wood fire, looking down at the misty town in the distance.
Phonsavane itself is reminiscent of provincial China – dusty, ramshackle and populated by people permanently wrapped up against the morning cold, even when the temperature starts to hit the high 20s. The bureau de change consists of several dodgy-looking men in bomber jackets hanging around on street corners. But the market is fascinating, a local trading centre where you can snack on such delights as gopher, squirrel and ant larvae. Such a shame I’d already had breakfast…
From Phonsavane we begin an epic journey by road to Luang Prabang. Whether such a trip appeals to you or not rather depends on your constitution – it’s over 250km, most of it on twisting mountain roads. My wife spends most of the trip lying across the seats turning various shades of green. But if your stomach can handle it, it has to be one of the most stunning road journeys in Asia – incredible mountain views, tribal villages with stilthouses perched precariously above sheer drops, welcoming H’mong villages with smiling children, and the occasional town where we stop for food & cold Beer Lao. Nevertheless it is pretty gruelling, and I wouldn’t be in any rush to do it again – and I believe my wife would rather shoot herself than ever repeat the experience!
After such an epic journey, even Wolverhampton would be a welcome sight, so the charming riverside town of Luang Prabang is especially welcoming when we finally arrive. The town sits between the Mekong (in one of its rockiest, most picturesque stretches) and Nam Khan rivers, surrounded on all sides by mountains. It is almost indescribably lovely, with old French colonial houses lining the riverside, many of them converted into chic bars & restaurants.Overlooking the town is Mount Phousi (pronounded ‘pussy’, a source of considerable amusement to yours truly throughout our stay, particularly when our guide says “this evening we go up the Phousi”) which offers magnificent views of the town, especially at sunset.
We spend 3 nights here (based at the wonderful Grand Hotel, a French colonial pile right on the riverbank) – I could have spent 33 nights and not been bored. Our days are spent wandering the old town, chatting to the friendly local monks, visiting the town’s myriad temples, strolling along the riverbank (occasionally stopping for a cold drink by the riverside), shopping at the busy night market, and trying to do justice to the town’s many restaurants (The Bakery does the second-best homemade burgers anywhere in SE Asia, after Mogambo’s of HCMC).
We also spend a memorable day chugging up the Mekong by boat, stopping off at local Lao villages to try rice wine and buy woven goods, as well as visiting the (highly overrated) Pak Ou caves. The scenery is breathtaking and offers a completely different Mekong to the flat, muddy-brown waters of Vientiane, Phnom Penh and the Delta.
Eventually it’s time to leave Luang Prabang and head back to Saigon (via Vientiane). But Laos has definitely cast its spell on me and gone top of my list of Asian destinations. The people are incredibly friendly, hospitable and laidback (none of them would dream of hassling tourists); the scenery is amazing; the towns are sleepy and relaxing; and in Beer Lao, they have one of Asia’s finest brews! What more could you possibly ask of a destination?
Fancy a trip to Laos? Email me on tim@comeandgovietnam.com and we’ll put it together for you!
Here at Come & Go Vietnam we love Tripadvisor. It’s a great forum for us to share advice on travel to Vietnam (and thus position ourselves as Vietnam experts), and it also provides invaluable free market research on what kinds of product visitors to Vietnam are looking for, and what those who have already visited thought about their experience.
One thing Tripadvisor doesn’t allow is self-promotion or advertising, so tour operators like myself can only go on there to give advice, and hope that our mere presence on the forums as local experts indirectly generates some business. However, the Vietnam forum in particular, as well as the Vietnam hotel reviews area, is notorious for local tour operators & hotels (most of them from Hanoi) either posing as tourists or just blatantly plugging their products - as Tripadvisor relies on its users to report such acts, these acts of self-promotion can often remain visible for several hours, though as forum users are vehemently opposed to advertising, it’s a pretty pointless thing to do.
Forum touts are generally easy to spot, displaying the following characteristics:
Misspelt foreign names (eg “Sipelius”) and locations (eg “Malaisia”)
Only 1 forum contribution to their name, rather than a solid track record of helpful posts
Use of “Vinglish” - a style of English unique to Vietnamese English speakers. Look out for missing plural “S” (eg “Cheer!”), or final “D” (eg “I am very surprise”); final “L”’s converted to “N”s (eg “Seoun” instead of “Seoul”); and the dreaded ellipses at the end of lists (eg “I go to Vietnam, Cambodia,…”)
One Hanoi hotel has recently pushed the boat WAY out in a cackhanded attempt to run some kind of social media campaign on Tripadvisor. The right way for a hotel to do this is to provide helpful information about the destination in which they are located - after all, if a hotel takes the time to post impartial and helpful advice on a travel forum, it follows that the hotel staff are in general friendly and helpful people.
The WRONG way to do it goes something like this:
1. Post dozens and dozens of fake reviews of your hotel in an attempt to bump your hotel up the local rankings. Further research shows that many of these fake reviews are copied & pasted from genuine reviews of hotels in other parts of the world.
2. When the balloon goes up and your ruse is spotted by Tripadvisor forum users, place fake postings on the forum claiming to be from guests who have stayed at the hotel defending the hotel’s honour, provoking guffaws of incredulity from genuine travellers.
The end result? Well, bags of free publicity for sure, but Brendan Behan’s famous maxim about there being no such thing as bad publicity doesn’t apply in hospitality, where trust is paramount.
This whole sorry incident does call into question the credibility of Tripadvisor’s reviews - this hotel was caught out because they weren’t smart enough to cheat the system, but there are plenty of people out there who are smart enough, and one has to wonder how many of them are writing hotel reviews at this very minute!
The solution? Take Tripadvisor hotel ratings with a pinch of salt - after all, anyone can write a hotel review on the site. Look instead at the ratings on booking sites like Agoda, where you can only rate a hotel if you have actually stayed there. The reviews may be less numerous, but they are 99.9% guaranteed to be genuine.
And if you’re a hotelier or tour operator reading this? Do some research into successful social media campaigns, and don’t give your business, your industry and your destination as a whole a bad name by scamming travel forums. As one disillusioned Tripadvisor user said earlier today:
“I am spinning my wheels on the reviews b/c I feel like literally every hotel is using scam-artist tactics and writing fake reviews. I trust no one at this point…and am so fed up with this situation that I feel like I want to cancel my flight to Hanoi”
Today’s Thanh Nien News has an interesting article about the use of ‘Tourism Festivals’ to attract tourists (at least the article doesn’t use “lure”, the sinister word often used by the local media when discussing tourism - given the sharp practices that go on in some sectors of the local tourism industry, it’s often pretty apt!).
“Many countries organize tourism festivals when tourism is slumping to ensure that they can attract as many customers then as when the business is booming” says the article. Do they really? I’ve never heard of any other country organising ‘tourism festivals’, as the very idea of a tourism festival would be enough to kill off tourism to that destination, at least for the duration of the festival itself.
It’s not that tourists dislike festivals; on the contrary, if the festival is a traditional one celebrated by the local people over several generations (such as Hong Kong’s Dragon Boat Festival), it is of great interest to tourists. Or if it’s a music festival, be it an all-encompassing one such as Glastonbury in the UK, or a specialist one such as the North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland, tourists will flock there to hang out, drink beer, listen to live music and meet up with like-minded visitors.
Sadly, most of Vietnam’s festivals do not fit either criteria, the assumption being that traditional local festivals are of no interest to foreign tourists, and live rock/jazz music, and their usual accoutrements, still being largely viewed as ’social evils’. So festivals are generally rather kitsch affairs, aimed halfheartedly at overseas visitors but attracting mainly excitement-starved locals. Any live music is likely to be Vietnamese love ballads (unlistenable to most foreign ears) or Celine Dion covers. Ever been to a flower festival here? Here’s a flower display. Here’s another one. OK, I get the picture. When’s the band on? Oh…
One of the festivals cited in the article is something called the Nha Trang Sea Festival. Here is a sample of this exciting event:
The event this year will introduce a street festival including pedicabs of flowers, tandems, carriages decorated with flowers which will parade the streets, a beer festival with the participation of the beer firms present in Vietnam.
In addition, a festival of picture embroidering will be held with unique rites by the XQ Nha Trang Company, which has built a house to worship embroidering ancestors at 64 Tran Phu Street.
In addition, exhibitions on pottery, calligraphy as well as artistic performances and fashion performances will take place during the Nha Trang sea festival. Ending the Nha Trang festival will be the day of walking.
The worship of embroidering ancestors? Saigon Beer? Calligraphy? A ‘day of walking’? None of it likely to have foreign visitors rushing to book flights, and none of it remotely associated with the sea.
Why not follow Phuket’s lead and get on the Asian yachting circuit? Get the rich yachties into town, get some live jazz going down on the seafront, and the place would be jumping. Embroidery doesn’t quite have the same pulling power…
…than to go through a tour operator. Since e-commerce took over the travel industry this has become the accepted wisdom. Why pay to book a hotel through a tour operator when you can go straight to the hotel and get a cheaper rate?
In many countries, this is true. Hotels and third party booking sites such as Agoda and Wotif offer ‘best rate guarantees’, assuring the punter that they won’t get a cheaper rate elsewhere. I’ve just been booking hotels in Paris & Berlin for my ITB 2010 trip in March, and couldn’t beat Agoda for rates.
But is it true in Vietnam? Despite claims to the contrary from the Tripadvisor independent travel lobby, the answer, in most cases, is no. Vietnamese hotels, especially locally-run ones, still don’t ‘get’ the internet. Many still don’t even have live booking on their websites, and persist in using request forms. Those that sell through online booking sites offer rates significantly higher than those they offer to tour operators like us. Why? Because for years, and to this day, tour operators have been the hotels’ bread & butter. People don’t generally travel direct to emerging destinations like Vietnam; they want to go through a full service agency who can book their whole itinerary for them, and in 2010 that is still the case.
When I worked for a 4* hotel, tour operators accounted for most of our revenue, and we treated them well, offering them rates up to 60% lower than our online rates. I pressed most vociferously for a more contemporary approach to internet sales, which is one reason I’m not working there any more!
So like it or not, most hotels here are still in the dark ages, and if you want cheap hotel rates, you’re better off going through a tour operator than going direct. Another advantage is the treatment you will likely receive from the hotel. If you’re a direct customer and you have a problem with you room or another aspect of your stay, and the hotel staff are ignoring your complaint, what can you do? If you book through a tour operator, they will normally sort out the problem for you. And if the hotel is overbooked, who do you think is going to get bumped? The direct customer making his first (and probably only) visit to the hotel, or the customer who has booked via a tour operator than gives the hotel hundreds of room nights every year? Hotels aren’t stupid, they like to look after their best customers.
And as a first-time direct booker, you aren’t one of their best customers!
