Da Nang - Ba Na Hill - Hoi An - Hue - Phong Nha Cave Tour 4 Days 3 Nights

PROs of tour: Comfortable tour bus Good driver Good food of simple typical Vietnam fare at restaurants but short time is allowed to eat. Feel rushed. Beautiful scenery Enjoyed places visited Hotels are ⭐️⭐️⭐️ some had minor problems like no cold water for a shower, clogged drains, no shower curtains, not clean enough towels, some beds were great others were very firm. Good air conditioning and fans CONs of tour: English tour guide seems not very experienced. She seems to be able to recite certain information in English but when that information has follow up questions, she is unable to answer. She also does this thing when we ask a question and she answers with information not asked that does not pertain to question. So we repeat it slowly or differently, and she gives us the exact same wrong information like we don’t understand. Her skills set for English is between beginner and intermediate. She does not explain what things are and their function. For example, she says “we are now going to a citadel”. It actually turned out to be an emperor palace that was 9km and we spent 2 hours. It was hot and we were not told to put sunscreen or bring water. Only a few things were mentioned about the place and any questions asked she did not understand. We just gave up asking questions it was too frustrating. Also her voice is so soft. She can be about 12 inches from me and I need to struggle to hear her. We have told her so many times we can not hear her and for a few seconds we raises her voice then it goes back to being low. Then we lose interest and walk off on our own. She gets frustrated because we are frustrated and with her. We did not follow the itinerary set on Viator, which is what we expected. I can understand mixing the days but we did not see things it said we would. For example: Visiting linh ung pagoda Visiting Buddhism museum Walking tour of ancient Hoi An city, we were told to walk around for an hour after dinner and meet back at bus. Stoping to take pictures at Lang Co. fishing village (we drove through it, she said) and she pointed it out to take pictures then went to a store for 50 mins that sold bamboo products. Taking photos at the 17th parallel Not stopping to visit hien long bridge or Ben Hai River. Things are not explained well by our tour guide. The Vietnamese tour guide talks to the group extensively, over an hour. Our guide 5 sentences. We are upset that we were told on Viator that there was a cable car ticket that would cost $700,000 VND each, we were charged $750,000. We were only told about fantasy park/sun world that it was a recreation of a French village. It is a type of small amusement park. We were told we had 3.5 hours total. One hour was to go up in the cable car to the Golden Bridge area (giant land) and gardens (fairy land). It was not enough time. We did not get to see the faint Buddha or pagoda. Then we went to the next cable car to the remaining area of the park and were told we had 1.5 hours to walk around. We were not told what to do. We found out there were lots of restaurants and places to drink and some rides that looked cool but we did not have time because of the long queues. We saw an entertaining show about the park that was 30ish mins but was not told where it was only the time it started. It was hard to find out this information from the employees since our tour guide did not tell us. Another thing that was upsetting was that on the Viator itinerary, it said we would see the Golden bridge. They never said it was part of the park, so if we didn’t pay for the cable car (in cash) was would not have gone and would have been sitting and waiting outside the entire time. Our four day tour was squeezed into three days and had to negotiate our 4th day (3 hours at the beach compared to first proposed 30 mins) to get the time we paid for and not waste it going to an airport or shop we didn’t need or want to go to.