Hanoi City GuideAbout Hanoi City Guide
An independent, unofficial guide to visiting Hanoi, Vietnam: what to see, which tour or ticket suits which plan, and how to spend one, two or three days in the Old Quarter and beyond. It is not affiliated with the Hanoi People's Committee, the Hanoi Department of Tourism, any museum, temple or mausoleum, or any tour operator, and it sells nothing. The whole guide starts on the Hanoi city guide homepage.
Why this site exists
Hanoi rewards a plan and punishes a vague one. Many sights close on a set weekday or for a midday break, the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum shuts for annual maintenance, and the same Halong Bay or Ninh Binh day trip is sold under a dozen names at very different prices. Taxi and motorbike-taxi fares, ticket windows and what a tour really includes are rarely explained in one place.
This guide puts those decisions side by side. Prices, hours and closed days come from the venue's or operator's own page. Where the official source states no figure, the page says not stated instead of borrowing a plausible one.
Where the information comes from
Admission, opening hours and closed days come from the institutions themselves, such as the Temple of Literature, the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum complex, Hoa Lo Prison, the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology and the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum. City-level information comes from Hanoi's official tourism and city authorities, and rail and airport transfers come from the operators' own pages.
Tour prices, durations, ratings and review counts are the booking platform's own published numbers. Practical detail about the city, such as which entrance moves fastest or what a street-food stop really costs, is cross-checked against several published sources rather than taken from any one of them.
Prices are shown in the currency the platform lists, and dong figures are approximations.
What this guide does not claim
There is no invented author here, no guide who has lived in the Old Quarter for years, and no claim that anyone from this site stood in a particular queue. We do not operate or personally conduct these tours, we do not inspect venues, and we do not audit operators.
We also hold no bookings. Every Check Availability button leads to the platform the tour is sold on, where the price, the terms and the cancellation window are theirs. Official ticket offices are linked directly, with no tracking, whenever buying direct is the better move.
How the site pays for itself
Tour and activity links on this site are affiliate links to GetYourGuide and Viator, and hotel search links go through Stay22. Book through one and the platform pays a commission, at the same price you would have paid going there yourself. That pays for the research and buys nothing else: not placement, not a rating, not the wording of a recommendation.
The full detail is on the affiliate disclosure page.
Corrections
Prices move, museums close for restoration and a tour changes what it covers. If a figure here is out of date, the fastest fix is to say so through the contact page. Tell us the page and what you saw, and it gets re-read against the official source.