Come & Go Vietnam

Here’s the slideshow from my social media presentation last week, brought to you by the magic of Google Docs…

Thanks to a genius new Tripadvisor app called Tripwow, I’ve put together a great new slideshow to showcase our top-selling Ben Tre tour (soundtracked by Autechre). Watch below, & enjoy!

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?

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?

…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!

Marketing guru Seth Godin recently posted an interesting piece comparing the service offered by two lemonade stands in his neighbourhood. One stand sells ready-made lemonade at a dollar a cup, with a minimum of dialogue and service. The other sells lemonade freshly made to the customer’s tastes, accompanied by plenty of helpful banter. No prizes for guessing which is the most successful.

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!

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.

It’s one of the biggest clichés in travel – if you want to know the best places to eat, drink or shop, ask a local. Tripadvisor forums are full of people looking for restaurants “where the locals eat”, or for markets “where the locals shop”.

But after nearly seven years in Vietnam I’ve come to realise that this is, basically, the wrong approach to take. I refer you to my blog post of yesterday, in which I reported a well-meaning but essentially clueless attempt to establish the top 100 places in HCMC- the restaurant and entertainment lists just contained places that the locals would recommend to tourists and expats, and bore no resemblance to the average foreigner’s list of hot addresses.

The Vietnamese are generally pretty narrowminded when it comes to eating and drinking – most of them would never dare try non-Vietnamese food, and expat bars are seen as “social evils”. Go to where the locals eat, and you may well end up in a cheap com binh dan shop, eating lukewarm, unhygienic mystery meat. Ask an expat, and you’re more likely to get suitable advice. Neither side is right or wrong; we just have different tastes. Ask a local where to go for a beach break, and most will tell you Vung Tau, which is the last place you should go for a beach break! Personally I love Phu Quoc for its peace and quiet; many Vietnamese people I’ve met say it is “boring”. Ask a local where to go for a drink, and they’ll send you to an overpriced Vietnamese café, or an equally overpriced hotel bar, and you’ll miss out on some of the city’s friendly expat watering holes. Shop where the locals shop in Saigon, and you’ll either end up in some grimy suburban wet market, or some hideous shopping mall pumping out deafening techno music, whilst we expats have Aladdin’s caves such as Saigon Square and Antique Street to ourselves. Chalk and cheese.

I also know plenty of Vietnamese who regularly eat at great little local restaurants but who would never recommend them to tourists or expats because “is not for foreigner” – instead they would point visitors in the direction of tourist restaurants such as Lemongrass or Vietnam House, which offer sanitised versions of local dishes at premium prices. These same people wouldn’t eat at a French restaurant or drink in an expat bar because “is only for foreigner”, as if there were some kind of apartheid in place!

“Ask a local” isn’t just wrong in Vietnam. I lived in London for nine years, spending most of it working for an inbound tour operator which employed a lot of young foreign staff. They all knew London far better than me, and any visitor to the city would have got far more useful information and tips from them than they would from any of us local staff. Follow the locals in a UK city and you’ll most likely end up in McDonalds.

Equally, when I went to China in 2007, I chose restaurants based on Tripadvisor recommendations from expats and visitors, and was never disappointed. When my Chinese guide made the choice, the food was poor and the surroundings less than salubrious.

It’s often the case that expats know their adopted cities better than the natives. Why? Well, with no tradition or family in the city, they have to socialise more to establish a social network and make friends, so naturally they go out more and explore the city. They often have more free time and spare cash. They also see the city from a different, more objective viewpoint, and have no cultural or regional bias. They also understand what fellow foreigners are genuinely looking for and which places they will like.

Still not convinced? OK, compare and contrast The Guide (ancient, venerable Vietnamese listings mag) with The Word, a stylish and well-written expat what’s on guide. The Guide’s food & drink listings have hardly changed since 2002 and still feature places that closed a long time ago; check The Word’s listings and you’ll find an authoritative list of the latest restaurants and bars, both local and international.

The basic truth is that locals, especially in Vietnam, will send you where they think you should go. Sadly, Vietnam’s destination marketing is based on this concept. But if you want to go somewhere where you will genuinely enjoy yourself, ask an expat or an experienced tourist!