Who we are, and what we are bad at

What this site is

Vietnam Travel is a directory. It exists to answer one question that the rest of the internet answers badly: given that you already know what you want to do in Vietnam, which company should you actually book it with.

We publish eleven rankings, ten operators in each, with what every company runs, who it suits and where it falls down. We publish the method that produced them. We publish our own interests on every page they touch. We do not sell tours, take bookings, hold client money or earn commission on anything you book after reading.

The site is published by 6AM Media Joint Stock Company, a marketing and media company based in Hanoi that works in the travel sector. That gives us a genuine advantage and a genuine conflict, and both are worth setting out plainly.

The advantage, and the conflict

Why a Hanoi media company is well placed to write this

Working in Vietnamese travel every day means we know how the industry is actually put together: which brand names sit on top of the same operations team, which "operators" are agencies with a good website, what a licence number tells you and what it does not, and why a quote can be forty per cent cheaper without anyone lying. A general travel-content site written from abroad cannot see any of that.

Why you should still read us sceptically

Ten of the operators listed here are partner companies of the publisher. The publisher owns none of them and holds no stake in any of them, but it works with them, and that is a real conflict. We manage it by marking every partner listing with the word Partner, by giving every partner entry a stated limitation, by never selling a position, and by publishing the whole arrangement on how we rank. You should still weigh those entries differently from the rest, and the site is designed so you can.

Things we are openly bad at

Every operator page here has a section on who the operator is wrong for. It would be absurd to leave ours out.

• We have not taken these tours. We rank on what companies publish and what can be checked from outside. That is a real limit and it is why we never claim a company is good, only that it demonstrably runs a particular thing.
• We are not neutral. See above. A directory published by a company that works alongside operators in the sector is a compromise, even without any ownership between them, and marking the partners is a mitigation rather than a cure.
• We are thin outside the main tourist regions. Coverage is strong in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Ha Long, Sapa, Ha Giang, Hoi An, Da Nang, the Mekong Delta and Phu Quoc, and weak almost everywhere else. If you want the Central Highlands or the far north east, we are not much use yet.
• We do not resolve disputes. If a booking goes wrong we can tell you what to ask for and in what order. We have no leverage over any operator, including the partners, and we will not pretend otherwise.
• We publish less than we know. Where a claim about a named company cannot be supported from published material, it does not go on the site, even when we believe it.

What we would like this to become

The current site is eleven categories and around a hundred operator listings. The obvious gaps are the ones we hear about most: cooking classes, cycling, birdwatching and the Central Highlands, plus city-level lists rather than national ones for the categories where the right answer changes between Hanoi and Da Nang.

The harder ambition is depth on the operators themselves. The ten profile pages exist because we have verifiable, current information about those companies. Extending that to fifty operators means getting licence numbers, group caps, ownership and cancellation terms from companies that have no particular reason to hand them over. If you run one of those companies, get listed explains what we need.

Questions travellers ask most

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