First of all I'm not really sure if I'm posting this in the right place - maybe it should be a review - if so somebody poke me in the eye and I'll move it.
I always mean to post a review after each of our holidays because I get so much from others reviews prior to us going, and then I get home, back to work and it all seems too hard. I’m going to make a determined effort this time.
Back in May this year, I booked frequent flyer flights from Brisbane to Ho Chi Minh City, allowing us 10 days in Vietnam. After discussion with my son who had spent a month in Vietnam last year, we worked out an itinerary. At some point during all this I googled something and found TNK Travel in Vietnam. So I completed the online form giving them our dates and where we wanted to be when and that we needed internal flights, four star hotels including breakfast and transfers.
All our dealings with TNK have been great – we had our initial quote back from them within 12 hours. Did a bit of tweaking – we explored a few other possibilities regarding where we would stay in Nha Trang – we were happy to accept TNK’s recommendations for both HCMC and Hanoi. During this period we would fire off emails and often have a response back within half an hour. I also got my travel agent to give us some comparison prices – which he got straight from the wholesalers – the difference in most of them was around $1,400 more expensive for exactly the same itinerary!
Once we agreed the itinerary, we arranged to pay a deposit – bit of a fiddly business as we had to scan copies of credit card, passports etc. – but it all went according to plan.
Our arrival in HCMC was delayed but our transfer driver was waiting patiently for us. By the time we got to our hotel – Grand Hotel – it was around 10pm. We knew we were due to fly to Hanoi the following morning but still had to pay the balance to TNK. I got the hotel reception to contact TNK – turned out our contact there Dac Danh was just about to call us. Anyway he came round to the hotel but was unable to process the payment from our credit card with the manual machine so he arranged a taxi and escorted us round to his office where we were able to pay online and he then escorted us back to the hotel.
The rest of our trip has gone like clockwork – the next morning we were picked up to go back to the airport for our flight to Hanoi – this was delayed several hours but our transfer driver was waiting for us when we got there. We stayed in the Quoc Hoa hotel in Hanoi – right in the centre of the Old Quarter. This was a lovely little boutique style hotel in an awesome location. That night we got a call from Dac Danh confirming the time of our pick up the following morning for our trip to Halong Bay. Again all according to plan – lovely driver, no English but lots of smiles and a great car – 4WD so a bit higher so could see lots. He handed us over to the Bai Tho Junk rep at Halong Bay who escorted us on to the tender boat for the junk. Then followed an amazing 24 hours.
Next day back to Halong Bay and our smiling driver and back to Hanoi for one more night at the same hotel (who had looked after our suitcases for us).
We then were picked up the next morning to get our flight to Nha Trang and again had a transfer waiting at Nha Trang airport. The Ana Mandara resort there was absolutely first class.
After 3 nights there we flew back to HCMC again for another 3 nights at the Grand Hotel. We hadn’t arranged any further transfers – slight communication breakdown between TNK and me – but didn’t care as knew our way around and were quite happy to catch a taxi.
We had arranged also a half day tour to the Cu Chi tunnels through TNK. This was excellent – once again a lovely car, good driver and a charming young guide who was both interesting and full of good humour.
Hope you haven’t found this post too long but just wanted to give a bit of an idea of what we booked through TNK and how we found them.
I would certainly use them again and would recommend them to my friends. I’m happy to respond to any queries.
