Halong Aclass Carina Cruise 1 night experience on Bay

Posted By : evt0
Very well scheduled cruise, multiple activities keep the days full. The food and staff attitude, as well as the guiding explanations are top notch. Additionally, they were very flexible in helping us book an alternative return trip and overall supporting our arrangements. Overall, we had great time and were left with very positive impression.

Unfortunately, some issues were present in the quality of the accommodation as well as the overall transparency from the staff. I will focus on two specific issues.
1. We originally booked Carina cruise, but ended up doing the Stellar cruise. While the itinerary is the same, the size of the boat and cabins is quite different. No communication whatsover was made to us about the change - I guess they were hoping we won't notice.
2. The room had a broken pipe in the floor or something, and there was a constant leak on the floor. The staff tried to convince us it's from the rain and can be moped up, but when it got wet again they offered us two options - either move to another cabin (lower deck, smaller windows, the 'deluxe cabin'), or put towels on the floor to soak the water up. At this point they also told us that our original cabin was actually the 'premium cabin', upgraded from the 'deluxe' we had paid for. I didn't really bother getting into the argument that 'deluxe' cabin on the pictures of Carina cruise looks more like the 'premium' cabin on Stellar.
We ended up staying in the original room, and soaking up the water and changing the towels a few times. We also got our drinks bill (about 20 USD) waived at the end in apology.

Again, despite the somewhat negative review above, we had a very positive experience. Please consider this review as an encouragement to resolve a couple of final issues, without which the trip would have been perfect. The staff did overall great job trying to make the best of the situation, but I couldn't shake the feeling that these mitigations have been employed many times instead of fixing the root cause.
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Posted On : 2019-10-13 10:30:33

Posted By : Chensing
The crew are very friendly and the dishes are quite delicious. The facilities and services provided also quite good thank Luca alot
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Posted On : 2019-06-10 00:31:36

Posted By : KQurious
We booked the Carina Cruise for 3 days/2 nights, choosing a smaller boat, about 18 guests on the boat. It looks like all the boats of this size were old (that was ok, we didn't expect a palatial boat) but the cabins could have been cleaner. The staff was great, going out of their way to help and accommodate every need, especially Tam and our guide on the day boat. There was almost too much food on offer. The day after arrival we had to transfer to a day boat for a day tour, and spend almost entire day on it - smaller boat, not exactly the same comfort but it was necessary to visit some of the places within the Bay. That day was way too long, we had too much time. It would have been better if we had visited another cave on the same day and have some free time on our boat the next day. On our last day we had an (very) early breakfast to get to the cave we could have visited the previous day, and then returned back to the boat for a cooking demonstration at 10am, followed by lunch soon after and then we just sat there at the dining tables and waited...they call it 'free time' - it's actually filling up time waiting from their bus from Hanoi to bring the next group. Don't expect to get back to Hanoi before 4-4:30. It was a bit of a waste of time, especially if your holiday was short - ours wasn't but it did shorten our time in Hanoi.
All in all - I would say that, with better organised tour, one night on the boat would have been enough except for not getting into the areas with less tourists. One only gets to go there on a 2 night tour.
It is sad to see Halong Bay suffering human pollution, plastic everywhere and too many tourists.
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Posted On : 2019-03-18 03:32:45