Hanoi City Tour: Day Tours and Walks Compared

Meeting points and start times are the ones each card states. Most day tours collect you from your hotel, while the walks start at a statue, a street door or a park near the lake.

Group Walks Versus Private Cars

The small-group walk caps its group at six and moves on foot, so the day runs 4.5 to 5 hours with the Mausoleum and Hoa Lo. The half-day or full-day city tour uses a vehicle with a driver and fits eight sights into up to eight hours, with the Ethnology Museum swapped for the Women's Museum on Mondays. The private car tour is $100 per person on the listing and includes nine major sights, lunch and all fees. If you have a stroller or an elderly relative, a car is the easier day, and the group walks are the better value if you are fit. The private option on the small-group walk runs 7 to 8 hours with hotel pickup.

Old Quarter Stories and Cyclo Rides

Two cards skip the Ba Dinh sights and stay in the old town. The story walk spends three hours on pagodas, tube houses, colonial shutters and courtyards, and the cyclo package puts a one-hour cyclo ride, three or four food stops and ao dai photos into four hours. The Old Quarter is the grid of trade streets north of Hoan Kiem Lake, and our Old Quarter guide shows how it fits together. These suit a second day or a late afternoon, since the Mausoleum interior closes before noon.

Student-Led Walks at $4.00 and $5 per Group

The student-led walks are $4.00 per group of up to 15 and run 3.5 hours, with French Quarter, Mausoleum and Temple, and war-history routes at 9AM and 2PM and a street food walk at 6PM. The cultural exchange walk is $5 per group for 3 to 4 hours. Both are priced per group, not per person. The first is tip-based, with under $15 suggested, and the second says no tips are expected.

Entrance tickets, including the guide's own, are paid in cash on the day and the listings state no amounts. They suit a student budget, and they are not a substitute for a licensed day tour with transport.

The table lines up what each card says it includes and what it leaves out. Cash figures are the listing's own.

The Cash You Need at the Gate

If a card leaves tickets to you, two official prices cover most of the route. The Temple of Literature costs $2.72 (VND 70,000) and Hoa Lo Prison costs $1.94 (VND 50,000). Both are open 8:00 to 17:00 every day.

Our guides to the Temple of Literature and Hoa Lo's prison museum have the details. The small-group walk lists $3.89 (VND 100,000) per person in cash, and the student-led walks list no amount at all, so carry small notes in dong.

Surcharges and Lunch

The Minsk and Jeep combo lists a fuel surcharge as excluded and gives no amount, so ask before you pay the $88. The half-day tour lists lunch as an optional extra even though its highlights mention a local lunch, so confirm which applies. The private car tour and the full-day puppet show tour include lunch, which is where the extra price goes.

If you want a food-first day, a food tour costs less than most of these and covers more dishes.

The matrix shows which of the four each card lists. It reads from the card's own places-visited list, so a blank means the card does not name the sight. The student-led walks change by option, and the cultural exchange walk follows your own route.

The Mausoleum Complex and Its Neighbours

The complex sits in Ba Dinh, west of the Old Quarter, with the One Pillar Pagoda beside it. Two cards also add the surroundings: the puppet-show day crosses Ba Dinh Square, and the private car tour adds Independence Square, the stilt house and the Presidential Palace. Visitors are asked to dress neatly and keep silent inside the interior, and when it is shut the half-day tour says the grounds stay open.

Our Mausoleum guide covers the rules and the queue, and this page tells you which weekdays to book the tour that includes it.

Temple of Literature, Hoa Lo Prison and the Lake

The Temple of Literature is the old national university, laid out in courtyards, and the half-day tour, the private car tour and the puppet-show day all include it. Hoa Lo Prison, the French-built prison that later held American pilots, is the last stop on the half-day tour at 15:15 and is also on the private car tour. Hoan Kiem Lake appears on the puppet-show day, the small-group walk and the cyclo package, usually as a stroll across The Huc Bridge to Ngoc Son Temple.

See the guides to the Temple of Literature, Hoa Lo Prison and the Hoan Kiem walk.

Train Street on the City Tours

Four cards list Train Street among their stops: the small-group walk, the Minsk and Jeep combo, the private car tour and the photo tour. The Hanoi Department of Tourism told operators in March 2025 not to run tours to the railway-cafe area, so read the stop as the operator's own description and never as a promise of a passing train. Our page on Hanoi Train Street covers the current situation.

Never stand on the track.

The table gives the cold-season visiting days from 1 November to 31 March. From April the morning hours shift, so confirm the time with the operator. The Mausoleum also closes for a period of yearly maintenance, usually in autumn, and the dates change each year.

One card names a different summer window, so check the dates for your trip before you pay for a Mausoleum-led day.

The cards agree. The small-group walk says the interior is open mornings only and not Monday or Friday. The full-day puppet-show tour says the same and adds the maintenance closure. The half-day tour says the grounds stay open on closed days. If you only have a Monday or a Friday, book a card that is not built around the interior, such as the cyclo package or the story walk. The Temple of Literature and Hoa Lo Prison are open 8:00 to 17:00 every day, so they never decide the weekday.

The operator's own page lists a route of 13 stops from Monday to Friday afternoon at 16:00 and a shorter route of 11 stops from Friday 16:00 to Sunday. The ticket covers one or two days, comes with a multilingual audio guide and free Wi-Fi, and cancels free up to 24 hours before. The buses are wheelchair accessible, with a space on the first floor and no ramp for storing the chair, and dogs are not permitted.

The stops line up with the sights above, which is why the bus appeals to a first-time visitor who wants the Mausoleum, the Temple of Literature and Hoa Lo without a guide.

The table shows how the two routes differ. Most stops are on both, and the weekday route adds the Central Post Office. The Opera House is the last stop on both.

The bus does not skip the Mausoleum closed days. A stop at the complex on a Monday or Friday still leaves the interior shut. If the bus is not running, a half-day tour or a private car does the same loop, and the Hanoi itineraries show how to fit it into a day.