Come & Go Vietnam

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”

Is that good publicity?

Ace HCMC listings mag The Word currently has a very unusual story on its website, about Hanoi renaming 36 of its streets after international cities.

“Each of these streets will feature the architecture and culture of its namesake country. The change would be made in an effort to increase aesthetic appeal and create some unique character for Hanoi. It would also be used to promote tourism and the city as an international shopping centre.”

Have you ever heard anything quite as bizarre as this? I’d love a pint of whatever the person behind this idea was drinking when they came up with it. In what way could this possibly help tourism to Hanoi? “Hey, they’ve got a street named after London, and they’ve knocked down some old Vietnamese buildings there and put up a replica of Carnaby St. Let’s go!”

However, before we all panic about the charm of poor old Hanoi taking yet another kick in the teeth, the article contains a proviso:

“Officials say it will not be easy because of the documents and processing required, as well as the lack of space.”

Which means, it ain’t gonna happen. Phew, that’s a relief…

This week Accor opened its latest Vietnam hotel, the 4* Mercure La Gare in Hanoi. You can read more about it here.

This is great news, as genuine 4* hotels are VERY thin on the ground in Saigon & Hanoi - Asian developers like the prestige of owning luxury 5* hotels and these continue to proliferate, but as I’ve been saying for years, anyone who opens a good, decent-sized genuine 4* in Saigon or Hanoi is going to clean up. Good luck Mercure!