About Hanoi Tourism Guide
Hanoi Tourism Guide is an independent publication about one city. Not Vietnam, not Southeast Asia — Hanoi, and the places close enough to reach and return from in a day. Everything here exists because the practical questions travellers ask about Hanoi rarely have a tidy answer, and the answers that do exist are scattered across forum threads from 2017.
Why a whole site about one city
Hanoi rewards preparation more than most capitals. The Old Quarter’s street plan is a thousand years of guild trade rather than a grid. Restaurants open for three hours and close. Bún chả is a lunch dish and finding it at eight in the evening means you are eating a worse version of it. Motorbike traffic follows rules that are real but unwritten. Train tickets to Sa Pa and Hải Phòng sell in classes that mean different things on different services. Weather swings from a 38°C June to a genuinely cold, grey February that catches out anyone who packed for "tropical Vietnam".
None of that is hard. It is just specific, and generic Vietnam coverage does not have room for it. So we gave it a site.
What is here
As of September 2026 there are more than 130 published guides, grouped into fourteen areas: the Old Quarter, things to do, where to stay, food, coffee culture, transport, day trips, weather and timing, culture and history, shopping, nightlife, safety, itineraries, and a running set of practical guides covering visas, money, health and etiquette. New guides publish through the week, and existing ones get revisited when something on the ground changes.
The itineraries are built for real arrival times, not for a spreadsheet. The day trips say how long the road actually takes, including the stretch out of the city. The food guides name streets and hours. The safety guide describes the specific scams that run in Hanoi — the card game, the shoe repair, the taxi meter — because "be careful" helps nobody.
How the guides get written
Each guide starts from what travellers are actually trying to find out, then gets built from primary sources wherever a primary source exists. Train timetables and fares come from Vietnam Railways. Visa and entry rules come from Vietnamese immigration and are cross-checked against the consular advice published by the US State Department, the UK FCDO and Australia’s Smartraveller. Health and vaccination information is checked against the CDC’s destination pages. Heritage and site information for places like the Imperial Citadel of Thăng Long comes from UNESCO and from the sites’ own operators. Opening hours, ticket prices and closure days come from the venue where the venue publishes them.
Prices are given in Vietnamese đồng with an approximate US dollar figure, and dated. Vietnam’s prices move, and a number without a date is worth very little.
Where something is a judgement rather than a fact — that this pho stall is better than that one, that three days is enough for a first visit — it is written as a judgement.
What this site is not
It is not affiliated with the Hanoi Department of Tourism, the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, or any government body. It is not a tour operator, a booking agent or a travel agency, and it does not sell tours, tickets, transfers or accommodation. Nobody pays to be recommended here, and no venue, hotel or operator has been given approval over what is written about them.
The site is supported by advertising rather than by the businesses it writes about, which is the arrangement we prefer: it keeps the food guide honest about the tourist traps on Hàng Bạc.
Corrections
Hanoi changes. Restaurants move, museums close for renovation, bus routes get renumbered, and a fare that was accurate in March is wrong by October. If you have been recently and found something out of date, we would rather hear it than not — the contact page goes straight to the person who edits the site. Corrections get made to the article itself, not buried in a comment.
Comments are closed site-wide. That is a deliberate choice: an unmoderated comment section on a travel site fills with touts and stale advice faster than it fills with anything useful, and a correction sent by email actually reaches the page it needs to fix.
Who publishes it
Hanoi Tourism Guide is a small independent project, edited and published by one person, writing under the Hanoi Tourism Guide name. It is not a content farm with a masthead of invented experts. If you want to know who stands behind a particular claim, ask, and you will get a straight answer about where it came from.
Thăng Long — the ascending dragon. That is what this city was called when it became a capital in 1010, and it is still the best description of the place.