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Palace Hotel. Do you that one place you tend to stay whenever you’re visiting a certain city? A place that is in your price range for an excellent location A place where you already checked out other hotels and airbnb nearby but nothing seems to compare?
For me, heading to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) Vietnam, Palace Hotel Saigon is my go to place when visiting this beautiful thriving city.
Recently, a coworker told me a story about his 'second home' in another city. He had been going to this particular hotel in Bangkok for the past 15 years. Yup you heard me right, 15 years! He knew all the staffs and the staffs knew him well. The sad part of this story is that sometime during this year of 2017, they're officially shutting down. He explained it as it felt like a recent break-up of a long term relationship (of course, not as deep but the same emotions are there).
It got me thinking about Palace Hotel. It's not perfect but compare to the other hotels we stayed around this area, it far beats them by a long shot.
I do apologize with the quality and quantity of some of these pictures. I didn't collect as much as I would've wanted too but we all live and learn! I'll make sure to take plenty of pictures the next time around.
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Location
Right in the center of Saigon, this is definitely the place you want to be during festivals or even just at night.
We did move around and booked some airbnb apartments outside district 1 but I absolutely hated it. The airbnb we rented certainly had better rooms and such, but the location ruined it. At nights when staying in Palace, I could walk downstairs and enjoyed eating the abundance of delicious street food around or do fun activities such as ride the hoverboard around Nguyen Hue Street.
Figure 1 - Look at this view from the Balcony
However outside district 1 at our airbnb, whenever we decide to go for a walk outside our apartment, all we encounter were securities! Although they were friendly, it was not a night out I was expecting.
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Figure 2 - Elevators and Stairs of Palace
$$$$
We split the cost of the room which was $70 CAD per night. It is more on the expensive side if you're not splitting the cost with someone else. You can definitely find cheaper hotels around this area for $30 to $40 per room. For it being on the expensive side, we did move around the area looking for cheaper and reasonable living space.
Other Hotels
What we found wasn't so pleasant at all. We stayed in a hotel where our air condition was completely broken. We called numerous times asking them to fix it but their solution to our problem was to bring us a fan which just blew hot air.
Figure 3 - Suite City View Room
Another hotel we stayed at for a lower price had no window (having no windows in the room felt a bit depressing to be honest) and you can hear the cleaning staff outside in the hallways vacuuming early in the morning.
As we all heard the saying, you get what you pay for. Splitting the cost with another person made it more rational and some days there were 3 of us making it a superb deal.
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Staff
When first arriving at this hotel by the airport taxi, we were blatantly getting scam. The bellboy of Palace told us we were overpaying for the cab ride and then tried helping us but with no luck. Even though we ended paying extra to that scammer, we had much more respect toward this bellboy and hotel afterwards.
Figure 4 - More views. It's all about the views!
Inside the reception area, most if not all spoke English. It was easy to communicate what we wanted or what we needed.
The Bad
The fitness room had nothing! I mean nothing. I was excited to go check out this so call fitness facility but upon arriving to this 'facility', I was completely shocked and disappointed. All I remember was one machine being on the left side of the room with no free weights whatsoever. It also had a weird smell upon walking in.
Figure 5 - Deluxe City View Twin Room
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The other problem we had was our key cards. Either the hotel staffs kept locking us out or there was something wrong with their system. For some reason, each night we would require to talk to the reception to get our key card reactivated. We had a total of 3 cards and none of them worked consistently.
Bonus!
On our last day in Palace Hotel Saigon, I noticed that the lobby was filled with new mattresses. There's only one reason for that, they're replacing the mattresses of course! Who doesn't like to see that from hotels?
Next time we land in Saigon, we're headed straight to Palace Hotel Saigon. We plan to stay there a couple nights then move around as I mentioned it can get expensive and this time, there'll only be two of us. No superb deal this time around.
If this is in your price range, I absolutely recommend checking Palace out for a few nights!
Come visit me at www.duysnextstop.com :)
Published by Duy Dang
7 years ago 
