Review: Park Hyatt Saigon

(By Andy) After our lovely stay in Danang, we were initially only go to Saigon for a layover en route to Hong Kong. But with our Halong Bay trip cancelled, we had 3 more days to explore Saigon, which is awesome. Also, the weather was much warmer than in Hanoi or Danang; it was mercifully in the 80s!

I went on to awardmapper and checked out what hotels were available with points. I also remembered that I still had a Hyatt Diamond Suite upgrade left. Fortunately, it looked like there was wide availability at the Park Hyatt Saigon on a cash + points rate. It’s a category 4, so only 7500 points + $100 per night. I transferred in the points from Ultimate Rewards then booked it. I then called the Diamond phone line using Skype, and sure enough, they had a suite upgrade available, into a Park Suite King.

If you’ve ever been to Saigon, you know that the traffic is an abomination! It took at least an hour to go the 5 miles from the airport to the hotel. Once we got there though, we were pleasantly surprised:

Stock photo obviously in this one. Beautiful building in a very bustling corner of Saigon, with a lot of really good restaurants nearby. Walking in to the lobby:

The entire hotel is grandiose but in a modern way (sorry, I’m not too keen on architecture). There were about 20 attendants in the lobby to help us with our every need, and every single one of them was incredibly courteous, lovely, and gracious. Fortunately there was no line and after being given local bananas and way too many bottles of water to handle, we were led to our suite in no time. Walking in:

It was clean and beautiful, with a huge living room, then leading in to an equally huge bedroom with a king size bed:

A little old-school for my tastes, but still very easy to chillax. Off of the living room is a kitchenette with complimentary bottles of water and, my personal favorite, Nespresso capsules!

The bathroom was en-suite (I just recently learned what that term means), and also huge. There was a huge enclosed shower with overhead fixture, a deep pool that even 6’1″ me could chill out in, and a separate room for the toilet and bidet. I got used to bidets when I lived in Bahrain for two years, but after using Japanese washlets, I have to say the latter are much preferable.

 

Outside, they have an enormous garden, pool, and meeting spaces:

The water temperature was slightly cooler, I guess since it was January, but with the temp 80 degrees outside, it was just right for me.

We of course received complimentary breakfast every morning at their Opera restaurant, which has a terrace overlooking the Saigon opera house. In addition to normal breakfast fares that you’d expect, there was pho and coconuts:

Their gym was big, and they also had a steam room and hot tub. I love steam rooms and hot tubs, even when it’s 80 degrees! No pictures for obvious reasons. Not quite as impressive as the Park Hyatt Tokyo’s, but still really nice. The central location let us walk to some amazing restaurants and museums. The Park Hyatt offers tours to places such as the Cu Chi Tunnels or the Vietnam War Museum, but they’re really overpriced compared to booking those tours independently, so I can’t recommend that. The only bad thing about this stay was that they wouldn’t accept my 2 $200 Hyatt gift cards as payment. When I read the T&Cs, they’re only redeemable in the US or Mexico. Oh well, other than that, this was an absolutely perfect stay.

Overall, this was how we felt about our 3 night stay there: