SenHotels.com is made by a team of seven people who have spent years building travel guides. Here we look for the places in Vietnam worth sleeping in: family homestays among the rice fields, old houses in the ancient towns, small hotels with ideas of their own and quiet resorts by the sea. The guide is free for travellers; we may receive a small commission from our booking partner when you book through our links, at no extra cost to you.
Most of us remember a trip by one night more than by any monument: coffee with condensed milk on a balcony over a lantern lane, a bicycle ride back through the rice fields at dusk, a family dinner in a homestay where nobody spoke the same language and everybody laughed. In Vietnam the place you sleep is part of the journey, not just a bed between two buses. That is what this guide is for.
Who we are
We are seven people with different backgrounds, from editing and design to data and travel, who work on a family of guides to places to stay. Sen is the one devoted to Vietnam. We write every page as if a friend had asked us where to stay: what the place is really like, which room to pick, what is around it, what guests keep mentioning, and the small things worth knowing before you arrive, from the passport at check-in to how far the beach really is.
How we choose
We don’t try to list everything. We have our own way of picking places, built and refined on our other guides, and we keep the details to ourselves. It looks at what guests say over time, at where a place sits compared with the others and with what matters most in that area, and at what kind of stay it offers: we favour homestays, old houses and independent hotels over big chains. Then every single page is read and checked by one of us before it goes online. If a place does not convince us, it simply is not here.
Few places, chosen well
We would rather show you a few places we believe in than thousands we know nothing about.
Read one by one
Every page is checked by a person before it is published. Prices and availability change: you always see them up to date on the booking site.
Character before stars
A family homestay with six rooms can be more memorable than a tower with six hundred. A good place to stay is not a question of budget.
Properties do not pay to be in the guide and cannot buy what we write about them.
Our independence and transparency
SenHotels.com is funded through affiliate links: if you book through our links, the booking partner may pay us a small commission. The price for you is exactly the same, and the commission changes neither what we write nor which places we choose.
We work from the information that properties publish and from what their guests say about them. Even with all the care we put in, a page may contain a mistake, and facilities and conditions change over time: always check the details that matter to you before you book. We explain everything in our legal notice.
Why “Sen”?
Sen is the lotus, the national flower of Vietnam. It grows in the muddy water of ponds and still opens clean and pale above it; you find it on temple carvings, in tea, in the seeds sold at markets, in the paintings of the old towns. For us it stands for what we look for in a place to stay: something simple and looked after with care, in the middle of everyday life.
How the guide grows
We add one area of Vietnam at a time, and only when we have found places we are happy to recommend. It is a slow way of building a guide, and that is the point.
You can explore it by region, by city or by type of stay. Every page takes you to the booking site to see the price and availability for your dates.
Do you run a homestay, a guesthouse or a hotel in Vietnam?
We like getting to know people who welcome their guests with care. Write to us through our contact page — also if you spot something that is not correct on one of our pages: we read every message.
Write to usFrequently asked questions
Is SenHotels.com a booking site?
No. We are an editorial guide: we handle neither bookings nor payments. When you choose a place, the link takes you to our booking partner’s site, where you see the final price and complete your booking.
Does it cost anything to use the site?
No. Browsing the guide is free, and booking through our links costs nothing extra.
Why are prices shown in US dollars?
Room prices are a guide: the lowest rate we found for that room, taxes included, in US dollars. You can switch the currency at the top of the page, also to Vietnamese dong. The final price for your dates is the one on the booking site.
Why don’t you list every hotel?
Because we prefer to choose. A long list of everything is easy to find; a short list of places we believe in is not. You can start from the regions page.