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!
According to the Vietnam National Tourism Administration (VNAT), only 30 percent of foreign tourists to Vietnam want to return the country, mainly businesspeople coming to Vietnam to study investment and business opportunities.
But director of VNAT’s Travel Department Vu The Binh said, “The number (of foreign visitors returning to the country) is normal, as tourism is mainly about discovery. So, if you visit one country this year, you want make a trip to another the next year.”
Frightening that someone working in tourism can have so little grasp of the importance of repeat business! The real figure of tourists (NOT businesspeople, who should not be counted as tourists) who do actually return to Vietnam is around 5%, as opposed to 49% for Thailand. There are many reasons for this, but one key reason is that Vietnam only seeks to attract cultural or “discovery” tourists, rather than holidaymakers, whereas Thailand has the sense to attract both.
Tourism isn’t just about discovery. It’s about relaxation, sunbathing, golf, watersports, food, fishing, nightlife, and pretty much any other of life’s pleasures you care to mention. Vietnam can offer all of these things perfectly well, but it sometimes seems as if the powers that be are ashamed of this fact!
To refuse to even acknowledge that the holidaymaker market exists and to settle for such a pitiful repeat visit rate is very, very shortsighted and this, more than any other of Vietnam’s tourism shortcomings, is what is preventing it from competing with Thailand and Malaysia as a major regional player.
Hoi An is deservedly one of Vietnam’s most popular visitor destinations. Sure, it’s a bit of a tourist trap, and has far too many tailor shops than it needs, but as discussed in a recent blog post it is beautifully preserved, had a great beach, and has more excellent restaurants per square km than anywhere else in the country.
But it still suffers from the Curse of Vietnam Tourism, ie the predictable and limited amount of tourism products on offer. You’ve had a stroll through the Old Town, taken a cyclo, wandered over the Japanese Bridge and taken a cooking class. What are you going to do now?
Well, look no further. We at Come & Go have partnered with an innovative local partner to offer some new out-of-the-ordinary experiences to make your trip to Hoi An even more special, or to give you a reason to go back if you’ve been there before! We are now offering:
Sailing trips to Cham Island in a traditional ghe nang boat, a lovingly reconstructed replica of the kind of sailboat that has not been seen in Vietnamese waters for over 40 years, and a really relaxing way to visit this beautiful island.
Family homestays on Cham Island - GENUINE homestays, not guesthouses masquerading as such. Guests can also participate in community projects/activities on this island which recently acquired UNESCO recognition as a biosphere reserve.
My Son Sanctuary tour with a difference - includes kayaking on My Son lake and a picnic on an island in the middle of the lake.
Jet Ski tours in Hoi An, Hoi An Delta, Cua Dai and Chu Lai Monkey Bridge
For more information on these tours and on how to make the most of your Hoi An trip, email us on hello@comeandgovietnam.com.
This reminded me of some guests who travelled with us last year. They had designed a very specific itinerary themselves and knew exactly what they wanted to do, right down to the room type they required in each named hotel. They sent this itinerary to six different tour operators in Vietnam. Five of those operators replied saying that, whilst they didn’t do that particular itinerary, they could offer them something similar from their list of off-the-shelf programmes. Only one operator - us - got back to them to discuss their itinerary in depth, to make suggestions, and ultimately to come up with a tailormade itinerary that met their exact requirements.
Isn’t that strange? That five companies would turn away good business (the guests spent over US$6,000 on their 14-day tour) just because they couldn’t be bothered to cost up a bespoke itinerary - an itinerary that the guest had already drawn up for them? That only one company out of six was prepared to discuss the customer’s requirements and give them exactly what they wanted? That five companies were perfectly happy to reject a high-end client and any subsequent referrals and WOM advertising that client would have given them, simply because the customer’s request didn’t match their standard product offerings?
Personally I find it highly bizarre, though obviously I am grateful for our competitors’ shortsightedness as we got the business! But it does highlight the intransigence of the Vietnamese travel industry. Flick through a few local tour operator websites and you will find a dizzying mess of tour packages, with the user left to navigate their way through hundreds of programmes in the vain hope of finding something that matches their needs. Surely it’s better for the customer if they can simply send a quick email saying what they want, and have the tour op get back to them with a proposal? Yes, it would be nice for us all if every customer came to our website and simply booked a standard tour, no questions asked - it would save us a lot of the time we spend establishing our customers’ needs and costing up itineraries for them.
But the world isn’t like that. Travellers are a lot more savvy than they used to be. They know that if they book a standard tour through a travel agent in their own country, they’re not going to get expert advice and they’re going to pay through the nose. The internet allows them to research their chosen destination in detail, decide what they want, and approach local tour operators who, in theory, are local experts. If all those tour operators can do is throw back a few tired, off-the-shelf tourist packages back at them, then that’s a pretty poor show.
Tailormade travel doesn’t have to be expensive, especially in a country like Vietnam where transport and accommodation is generally cheap. And from the tour operator’s point of view, independent tailormade travellers are great customers - they’re well informed, culturally aware, less likely to throw a fit when something goes wrong, and more likely to sing your praises on sites like Tripadvisor.
Yes, costing up unique itineraries for each customer is labour-intensive, but at the end of the day, it’s better than watching $$$ of business walk out of the door!
At Come & Go we pride ourselves on selling tours that take our clients off the usual tourist routes and give them something a touch more authentic. This email I received yesterday, from a customer who took a Mekong Delta tour, sums up how much people enjoy this approach!
Hello Tim and Nghiep and Tung,
What a great trip we had with you guys.
Asking for a trip away from the usual tourist hustle, you delivered.
Flexible itinerary, accommodating guide and driver makes for very happy travellers. The impromtu clamber up the river bank into the coconut place was exciting, different and the walk past the local homes where we stopped to talk to the families was a joy.
We agreed it is so much better to wait for the public boat, take a slow motorbike ride, and talk to the locals.
Meals were a treat, Nghiep choose brilliantly, the local places with the regional specialities, delicious.
Final day fantastic, we wont forget the durian bought at the wayside stop, the friendliest people at the cafe where they cut it up for us, superb hospitality and the walk down the laneway where Nghiep showed his extraordinary knowledge of local foods and plants and of course the rice wine with the locals.
I’ll be back working in Vietnam in Oct and already thinking of new adventures!
Nghiep and Tung, thanks, the karaoke and the chillies are special memories.
Warmest regards,
Anita
In the first of a new series of blog postings, I look at some common beliefs about travel in Vietnam and do my best to debunk them.
In this first piece, I look at scammers. Scams are a common topic on Vietnam travel forums, for example the excellent Tripadvisor. The most common scams seem to be:
Airport taxis offering “deals” instead of switching their meters on
Hotels bumping guests into hotels of a poorer standard
Tour operators not delivering what they promised
Halong Bay boat cruises advertising luxurious boats then putting tourists on creaky old wrecks
Shops and market stalls overcharging foreign visitors
First of all, I’m not denying that these scams exist. They all do, and the first one in particular regularly hooks first-time visitors – such as me back in 2002! Being scammed, ripped off and overcharged can easily ruin your day, or indeed your whole holiday, and Vietnam’s pitifully low return visitor rate (around 5%) is partly attributable to the country’s reputation for seeing tourists as little more than wallets on legs.
But let’s get a little perspective here. Firstly, unless you’re an extremely naïve first-time traveller (and such travellers tend not to visit Vietnam anyway) you’re unlikely to fall for any serious scamming, and any overcharging that goes on will be pennies rather than pounds. What scamming does go on is extremely transparent, especially for anyone who has travelled to countries like Egypt, where scamming has been refined into an art form.
Secondly, in my opinion the culture of scamming/overcharging has its roots in Vietnam’s formative tourism years, when the only visitors were backpackers, a notoriously suspicious, miserly lot who enter every transaction determined to spend as little as possible and seem to think that anyone who tries to sell them something is a servant of The Man, dedicated to ripping them off. Faced with such tough customers, the Vietnamese had to use all the wiles they could to get these early tourists to spend, and still tar all visitors with the same brush. But generally, if you show a spirit of openness and generosity while you are here, it will (mostly) be reciprocated.
So whilst plenty of tourists do get scammed, plenty more get through their visit unscathed, either because they have the right attitude or because they’ve read the travel forums before they come and know how to avoid the ripoffs.
So before you come, do your research, and familiarise yourself with what scams exist and how to deal with them. And if, while you’re here, someone does blatantly try to scam you, just laugh and walk away, and warn your fellow tourists. Either way, don’t let Vietnam’s bad reputation in this area put you off or spoil your stay. In the long run, it’s the cheats who will lose out, not you.
