My husband, adult son and I recently spent 16 days traveling in Vietnam. For four of those days we were in Hue and Hoi An and the surrounding area and then 2 days in Ho Chi Minh City with Xuan Tu Tours. I have had the wonderful opportunity to travel throughout the world and my experience with the guides of Xuan Tu Tours was amongst the best. For our time in Hue/Hoi An we had the most wonderful, delightful, engaging young woman, My (pronounced Me which drove my grammar obsessed husband crazy), as our guide and Vu as our driver. From the very beginning, My felt like she was part of our family or we were part of hers. She was very happy to be able to show us her home of Vietnam and shared lots of information about herself and her family. She was also very interested in us, where we lived and our family, asking to see pictures etc. My did a great job of explaining the history of Vietnam to us and all the sights we were seeing. She managed to strike the perfect balance of being informative without overloading us. She was also always extremely attentive to our needs, asking us if we needed water or to use the WC etc. My was very frank with us, telling us when we were being funny, and in my case once, while taking my picture, telling me to fix my hair because I didn’t look so good! We all got a big laugh out of that. My is simply fun to be with and so easy to travel with. She also didn’t take opportunities to shorten our day when we offered them, insisting there was time to see everything. We were so glad we did because otherwise we might have missed the Marble mountains which was a highlight of one of our days. After she left us, My stayed in touch to make sure that we had arrived at the airport all right and to wish us safe journeys. We were very very sad to leave her. If you do a tour with Xuan Tu Tours in Central Vietnam please request My and Vu, you will be thrilled you did. In Ho Chi Minh CIty, we were paired with Lan and Hong. Lan is also an excellent tour guide. She happily shared her viewpoints and told us what she had been taught in school and sincerely wanted to know how that differed from what we had been taught as Americans. She was also very happy when she would learn new phrases from us, like passive aggressive. LAN’s pace is perfect, not too fast nor too slow. She knows exactly the right points and highlights to hit and conveys a lot of information without it feeling like too much. Because of this, we were able to see a lot of sites in a single day without feeling like they were drive buys. I especially appreciated the nearly one hour rickshaw ride we did throughout Ho Chi Minh CIty. It was a wonderful experience and a great way to see the city. LAN was also extremely flexible. She arranged it so that we stopped to get my son a new SIM card for his phone and went back to where we were staying to pick up my husband who had not been feeling well in the morning. Nothing was a problem for her. LAN also knew when we wanted to talk and when we needed some down time. She also helped me arrange a ride to the airport I had not requested in my initial booking. If you visit Ho Chi Minh City, please ask for LAN and Hong. As an aside, I must give praise to LAM back at home base who made himself available through WhatsApp 7 days a week to answer questions and provide assistance when we needed it. We very much appreciated his steady hand in the background. If You go to VietNam don’t think twice about booking with Xuan Tu Tours. They are the best.
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Traveller: romaneyb from Tripadvisor 