Convenient booking, responsive staff, but very crowded group tours
My friend and I used this tour group for 2 tours in Hanoi- Halong Bay and a city tour within Hanoi. Booking was convenient in that the staff were very responsive by email, though they do ask that you pay in person in advance of the
trip, so we had to make our way to their office to pay them the day before our tour; otherwise you can pay online but you'd be charged a transaction fee of 3.5%. We paid extra to have them pick us up at our hotel which was far from the Old Quarter. However, on the way back from one of our tours, because of logistical issues, they couldn't drop us off directly at our hotel, even though this was the original agreement and we had paid extra for this. Instead they put us in a taxi to take us back to the hotel, which would have been fine except that they didn't use one of the more reputable taxi companies in Hanoi and instead we got a very sketchy taxi driver, which was what we were trying to avoid in the first place by paying the tour group extra to pick us up and drop us off directly at our hotel. Our tour guides spoke English well and seemed very nice. They definitely crammed A LOT of people into the group tours, though. For the Hanoi city tour, we had 14 people in what appeared to be a 12 seat van, and I think the tour guide was sitting on the floor of the van during the whole trip. So, expect to be in a big group if you choose to do group tours, though the group tours are considerably cheaper than the private tours, which is why we chose them. We did shop around a few tour groups prior to booking with this one, and it did seem that this company had competitive rates and their office location and staff seemed to be the most professional of the ones we considered.
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