Come & Go Vietnam Blog

As we all know, the hotel business is a very competitive one. Go to Agoda and search for a 4* hotel in, say, Bangkok, Hoi An, or Siem Reap, and you’ll be given dozens, hundreds even, of options, most of them fairly interchangeable in terms of quality, facilities & rates.

As competing on rate alone is a recipe for disaster, many hotels offer an increasingly diverse range of value-added benefits to attract customers – free wifi, iPod docks, welcome drinks & the like are all attractive to guests, with the added advantage of costing the hotel very little. But there is one frequently offered benefit, of which hotels always seem curiously proud, that, for me at least, defies explanation, and that benefit is the turn-down service.

If you’ve never been turned down before, it’s pretty simple – some time in the early evening, while you’re out having dinner or carousing in the local taverns, the housekeeping staff sneak into your room Ninja-style and…wait for it…pull back the corner of the blanket or duvet, thus making it easier for you to get into bed on your return. Fantastic eh? Some hotels gild the lily a bit by leaving chocolates on the pillows or, in one hotel I stayed in recently, leaving an ornate paper scroll with a bedtime story on it on the bed (personally I’d rather have seen the time spent writing, printing and distributing said bedtime story devoted to teaching the chef how to cook bacon properly, but that’s just me) but the duvet bit is the essential part. Some hotels even offer the turn-down service as an optional extra – yes, you can actually call reception and ask someone to come & turn down the duvet for you. I think I’d feel less ashamed calling reception & asking them to wipe my bum for me.

Now, I’m one of the laziest chaps ever to check into a hotel, and I always enjoy the experience as it means someone else has to clean up, make the bed and cook my breakfast. And if I’m staying in a hotel it usually means I’m either out having meetings, standing on my feet at a trade show all day, sightseeing/travelling, or out enjoying the local nightlife, and so when I return to my room I’m either jetlagged, tired, drunk or a combination of all three.

But never, in all my years of hotel-staying, have I been so exhausted or inebriated that I couldn’t even pull the duvet back to get into bed. But I was once so drunk I failed to notice the complimentary chocolate on my pillow, and woke up with it stuck in my hair. Maybe that’s a benefit too.

I recently posted an account of one Hanoi hotel’s attempts to cheat Tripadvisor. In a similar vein, I’ve just received an extremely entertaining sales email from a new Hanoi hotel that opens on 10th December this year.

Firstly, this establishment claims to be “Hanoi’s First Luxury Boutique Hotel” (and also, “Hanoi’s Firt Luxury Boutique Hotel” and “Hanoi First’s Luxury Boutique Hotel”). The existence of several well-established luxury boutique hotels in Hanoi (eg Serenade, Silk Path, Maison d’Hanoi etc) doesn’t seem to have deterred them from making this claim.

But what really piqued my interest was the “Testimonials” page on their website. That’s right, customer testimonials for a hotel that hasn’t even opened yet! Let’s examine this work of comic genius in greater detail shall we:

Firstly, we have the expansively named Mr Aldamizetxebarria, evidently a Spanish cross-dresser, who actually criticises the hotel and says “My impression was not bad, but I expected something more”. Surely not the glowing praise one would normally put on a Testimonials page!

Then we have a Mr Kathleen O’Hara from London, who presumably to remain anonymous has disguised himself not as one woman but two (clearly the hotel is going for the lucrative European transvestite market), and who mentions the surprising fact that the hotel not only has two wings, but is currently being refurbished, despite not having opened yet! And wait a minute – 2 wings, refurbishment – that sounds a bit like the Rex in Saigon doesn’t it.

Surely they can’t possibly have just copied & pasted reviews from other hotel websites can they? Oh my god, they most definitely can!

From a review of another hotel on the Vietnam Tourism site

Great work guys, and thanks for brightening up my day!

As a regular business/leisure traveller and web addict, wifi access is very important to me. And this is one of the great things about living in Vietnam – virtually every café, bar and restaurant has free wifi, meaning I’m never far away from a connection. Sadly, the same cannot be said of hotels, at least not all of them.

I spent a couple of days last month escorting our new German sales rep on hotel visits, and one of the questions we asked in each hotel was “Do you have free internet?” In budget hotels (3* and below) the answer was always “yes”. In luxury hotels (4*/5*) the answer was invariably “no”, with one notable exception (Caravelle, take a bow!).

What this basically means is the more I pay for a hotel room, the less likely I am to have free internet, and if I stay at a 5* hotel I’m expected to fork out $25 per day for wifi on top of the $100+ I’m paying for my room. Does that make sense to you? Because it doesn’t make any sense to me. 5* hotels cater mainly for business travellers for whom internet and email are essential business tools, whereas budget hotels cater more for tourists who, whilst they will almost certainly use internet at some point during their stay, are equally happy to head out of the hotel and use an internet café.

The stupidity of the situation was highlighted when in one luxury hotel, which even charges for internet use in its lobby, I was able to connect to half a dozen free wifi connections provided by neighbouring cafes where, for the price of a drink, I can sit and use free wifi for as long as I want.

The irony is that 5* hotels throw all kinds of free stuff at their guests, much of it stuff that I virtually never use – bathrobe, TV, kettle, complimentary comb, body lotion etc. Obviously these are all tangible items that create a sense of luxury, whereas wifi is invisible, but I would willingly give up my bathrobe, free comb and even my TV for a free internet connection.

So come on hoteliers, it’s 2010, and to many travellers, an internet connection is as essential as hot water, pillows and a decent breakfast – stop charging us for something we can get for free everywhere else!

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.