All this week our roving correspondent Claire Duffett will be sending back her reports on the Vietnam Hotel Scene. Any questions or suggestions? Send 'em our way and we'll have Claire answer them for you.

We’ve been infatuated with Hotel Continental Saigon ever since we read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American way back when. Alas, we modern-day journalists can’t afford to stay in the place where Fowler and his fellow foreign correspondents partied back in the 1950s.

Despite our modest means, we still managed to catch a glimpse of the hotel when we passed through town a few weeks ago. And it met—and exceeded—our expectations. ]]> ced138 2009-02-13T09:02:51-05:00 http://www.hotelchatter.com/story/2008/11/23/7740/9927

France's meddling in Vietnam really didn't turn out well for anyone. But one of the positive side effects to the colonization is the Hotel Continental Saigon, in present-day Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. So it's no wonder Graham Greene made his protagonist a guest at the hotel when he wrote The Quiet American.

Gorgeous, imposing and extravagant French Colonial hotels are perhaps the only thing in HCM more ubiquitous than families of five speeding past on lawnmower-engine mopeds. Of these hotels, Continental is certainly the most historic and quite possibly the most beautiful.]]> ced138 2008-11-24T10:34:14-05:00 http://www.hotelchatter.com/story/2008/4/24/62741/1983 <![CDATA[<p><i>You know the scene. You open the door to your brand new hotel room, run over to the window, open the blinds and bam, you are hit with the anti-view. Maybe you are looking down a dirty alley, witnessing a drug deal, staring at an air shaft in the face, or seeing a brick wall. Whatever you are viewing it is not extremely pleasurable. Help out your fellow hotel mavens by uploading your anti-views to the <a href="http://flickr.com/groups/hotelchatter/">HotelChatter/Flickr photo pool</a>, or by <a href="mailto:tips@hotelchatter.com">sending the photo along to us</a>. Remember to tell us the name of the hotel and the room number with the not-so-easy-on-the-eyes view.</i><p><p> <img src="http://www.hotelchatter.com/files/3873/ANti_View_Ho_Chi_MinhCity.jpg" class="imgborder"><p> <p>How's this for a contrast: if you stay at the <a amandak 2008-04-24T09:33:43-05:00 http://www.hotelchatter.com/story/2008/3/6/94631/95835 <![CDATA[<p><img src="http://www.hotelchatter.com/files/admin/sofitel_hanoi.jpg" class="imgborder"> <p>French hotel operator Accor announced this week that they would be ramping up their presence in Vietnam, <a href="http://english.vietnamnet.vn/travel/2008/03/772124/">adding 12 hotels to their current 8 by the end of 2010</a>. <p>Forget any visions of unspoiled hill tribe regions in the far north: the 150-room Pullman Sapa Resort and the 200-room Pullman Lao Cai Hotel are on the way. Heavily touristed Ha Long Bay will get its first international hotel: Novotel Ha Long Bay, opening this summer. <p>Two new Mercure brand hotels will open in Hanoi, scheduled for 2009 and 2010--the first Mercure hotels in the country. More Novotels are on the way, including one in the beach resort area of Nha Trang. <p>Surprisingly, there were no high-end Tim L. 2008-03-06T11:01:00-05:00 Search HotelChatter string http://www.hotelchatter.com/search/