Fantastic boutique hotel, plus free speedboat and minibar

“We absolutely loved this hotel. Beautiful, quaint, great staff, lovely food and wonderful rooms. It’s no wonder that this is the top hotel in Saigon on Trip Advisor (at the time of writing).

We stayed in a beautiful room overlooking the pool, with a deeply comfy double bed, separate shower room and washing facilities, TV, private balcony and all the usual mod cons included.

Their service is second to none. There’s a free minibar in all rooms (including beer, water, milk and juice). They serve breakfast at any time of the day (seriously – you could have it at 10pm if you REALLY sleep in), and it’s included in the price of the room. And electricity can be left on in your suite when you leave, meaning those devices that keep dying might actually get charged. They have UK plug sockets too.

Best of all, as the hotel is not right in the city centre, they put on a speedboat to ferry guests to the main bit of the city, on a first come first served basis. (Although it was never full when we stayed in May). The boat takes approximately 15-20 minutes, but you’d wish it would be longer, because it’s brilliant. The last boat is at 6pm, and a taxi back to the hotel should set you back 150,000 VND. If it’s more than that, they’ve got lost!

The pool is excellent, as is their restaurant, which is overseen by Kevin the chef from Luxembourg – who will certainly seek you out to say hello, or offer some food and drink recommendations. Food and drink here, incidentally, is a few more pennies by Vietnamese standards, but very fair when compared to the rest of Saigon, and even better when compared to the likes of London.

Breakfast, which I briefly mentioned, is very good. The best we had in Vietnam, in fact. And it offers up some really well done variations of Western classics like pancakes or a full English versus your traditional and excellent Pho noodle soup. (If you’re really hungry, you can even have both – in fact, it was them who suggested it, which I greedily accepted).

Their staff are great, too. When we wanted to visit the Cu Chi Tunnels, the front desk organised a speedboat to pick us up from the hotel’s own private jetty – and one of the highlights of our trip.

If I was to take points off this hotel, and it is being picky, then their airport to hotel transfer service is very expensive in comparison to most hotels we stayed at in Vietnam (all of which have a comparative distance from airport to destination). It was a nice air conditioned private car, but then it was no better than every other hotel provided us. And 1,386,000 VND is a bit steep.

Full disclosure: they had quoted this price to me some time before we arrived in Vietnam, and I could have shopped around for cheaper prices, so I can’t really blame them for quoting a price to me and then accepting it. But it might be something they could look at in the future!

The taxi they booked us for our return to the airport after our stay was much, much cheaper at 300,000 VND. So maybe shop around for your original pick-up. I know there’s loads of ‘taxi scams’ in Vietnam, but you should be able to find a decent service for cheaper transfers if you need.

None of that dented out love of Villa Song Saigon, and I would have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone. I really miss their speedboat...”