PRICE:
Frommer's Highly Recommended

This sprawling property -- always busy -- along the Saigon River gets mobbed with groups on package tours or large business and incentive crowds. The professional staff is quite unflappable though, and handles it all cheerily. This large, 17-floor Japanese joint venture is also popular for Japanese business travelers -- a good sign of a consistently high standard. Rooms are spacious if rather simple, like a chain hotel anywhere (although this is not a chain). Legend rooms are large, luxe, and just one step down from the town's best: the Caravelle and the Sheraton. In rooms, you'll find cool built-in Chinese cabinets on one wall, and pastel colors throughout, which are a bit unsettling, but all done in a tasteful modern design. Bathrooms are stylish with black granite counters and black wood trim. Views of the city and river are "legend," especially from higher floors -- the hotel is far enough from the downtown clutter of buildings to offer clear views, but close enough for convenient access to the many shops and restaurants on Don Khoi. The overall scale is large, from a double-height colonnaded lobby, all glass and marble with faux stained-glass ceiling and large, bronze prancing horses, to the sunken dining area and nice circular pool out back. Everything is clean and neat. A fine downtown standard, and a welcome break from the city's many dull, state-owned hotels.

Copyright: Excerpted from Frommer's Vietnam, 2nd Edition, (c) 2008, Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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