About

The person who designs your trip is the person who answers your email

You are thinking about sending several thousand dollars to a company in a country you have never been to, run by a person you have never met. That is a strange thing to do, and I would hesitate too. So before anything about Vietnam, here is exactly who is on the other end of the email.

Who I am

My name is Mai Tiến Tần. I have been running tours in Vietnam for nearly twenty years. I registered this company, Vietnam Travel and Technology Co., Ltd, on 9 November 2011, and we have held an international tour operator licence since 2018 — number 01-1082/2018.

Before I ran the company, I was the one on the bus. I started at the bottom of this industry and worked through it, which is why I am opinionated about things like how far apart hotels should be and which day of a route should be the light one.

I am not a licensed tour guide and I do not call myself one. The guides who travel with our groups hold their own professional cards. My job is designing the route and answering you.

How to check all of this yourself

On travel forums, Americans planning a Vietnam trip tell each other the same thing: before you pay a Vietnamese company, ask for a scan of their tour operator licence and their business registration, and check the government register. That is good advice, and it works on us.

If a Vietnamese company will not send you those documents, that in itself is your answer — about them, and about us.

What I will not claim

Nearly every Vietnamese tour company’s website says the same three things: trusted, award-winning, years of experience. I have no way to prove I am more trustworthy than the next company by saying so, and neither do they.

So here is what we have not got.

• We do not have a page of American customer reviews yet. Most of our work has been with other markets. Reviews from travellers like you are the thing I would most like to show you and cannot, and I would rather say that than fill the page with testimonials you cannot check.
• We do not run fixed departure dates. Every trip is built around your dates. That is genuinely better for most couples, but it does mean you will not find a calendar of guaranteed departures here.
• We are not a 24-hour call centre. If you write at two in the morning your time, you will get an answer when Vietnam wakes up. What you will not get is an answer from somebody who has never walked the route.
• We have not counted the steps yet. Other sites publish step counts for the sites we cover. We have not measured ours, so we do not print them — see how much walking is there really for what we do and do not know.

How this site is written

Three rules, and they are the whole method.

1. Every price carries the date it was checked and where it came from. Prices here change, and a figure without a date is worse than no figure.
2. Every photograph is ours, taken on a dated day in a named place. The captions say which. There is one exception, and it is labelled below.
3. Where we do not have a number we can stand behind, we say so rather than copying one from another website. You will find that sentence on several pages. It is not modesty; it is the only honest option.

Company facts

What we publish

Twenty guides to central Vietnam and the practical side of a first trip, written from Da Nang. Prices and rules carry the date they were checked, and each page says where its figures come from:

• All the guides in one place
• 3 days in Da Nang and Hoi An — the plan we would give our own parents
• Six things to settle before you plan a Vietnam trip
• The best time to visit Da Nang and Hoi An

If Vietnam is on your list, the next step is not a booking. It is a conversation where you tell me what you want out of the trip and I tell you honestly whether we are the right company for it. Sometimes the answer is no.