Lakeside House

Beautiful rooms facing a cute tiny lake in a lively but at the same time quiet area of the city - just 7min from the old quarter. Many local food options around and 10 Cafés within 2min walking - owners and staff extremely helpful and friendly, we'll come back!🙏

DO NOT book this hotel or associated properties (Lakeside House 1, 2, and 3). Be aware that you may receive a different room from what you booked, and that this business operates in a bizarre and unscrupulous way. Even though I did not book at this Lakeside House, we ended up staying here anyway... We booked 2 rooms for 2 people at Lakeside House 2 for 3 nights. Just as some reviews have noted, we received a message at 4pm on check-in day that the hotel was overbooked and the rooms we booked were not available, but the hotel would accommodate us in different rooms instead. This was not encouraging, but we went ahead, hoping for the best. The rooms they put us in were not in Lakeside House 2, but Lakeside House 1 (this one). Lakeside House 1 has a good location. The lake is cute and there are nice coffee shops and restaurants around it. Lakeside House 2 is down a dark, narrow alley. However, the rooms we were given were awful (see pictures). They were windowless, claustrophobic, grimy, run-down, muggy and damp due to poor ventilation, and located up several flights of stairs with no elevator. There was absolutely no comparison with the rooms we were supposed to have booked. Immediately we were concerned, but not sure what to do. We asked if we could be moved to other rooms. The hotel manager Tam, a young woman who works from the front room of Lakeside House 1, told us that there were no other rooms available, and that the only one coming available the next day was identical to the ones we already had (windowless) — so clearly there would be no point in moving. We pointed out that the rooms we had paid for were more expensive than the ones we were given. She said the rooms we booked were more expensive because that building is newer, but offered us nothing in return, as though this had nothing to do with her or the hotel. Later that evening, I spent hours calling Agoda customer service, because there was no way we could stay in those terrible rooms for three days. I barely slept the first night because the room was so claustrophobic and unpleasant. Agoda has a “reservation guarantee,” where if the hotel cannot honour the reservation you made, they are supposed to help you find an alternative hotel, or refund the full booking. Agoda said they would have to call the hotel to confirm our request for an alternative or a refund. When Agoda got back to me just after midnight, it seemed that from either their or the hotel’s perspective, we were not eligible for the guarantee because in “agreeing” to stay in the other rooms we had accepted the hotel’s alternative solution. The hotel manager had declined to refund us but said they would “work with us in the morning” to find a solution. It turned out that the solution was just to move us back over to Lakeside House 2 and to the rooms we had booked in the first place, which meant the hotel manager lied to us, since they had said the previous day that there were no rooms coming available. Naturally there was no acknowledgement of fault whatsoever on the part of the hotel and from here on out Tam completely ignored us. The rooms in Lakeside House 2 were much better — they were the same rooms as in the pictures, although a bit run-down. I knew this was a budget hotel — I wasn’t expecting luxury. But the idea of billing these two sets of rooms as comparable is completely laughable. The rooms we were first given were by far the worst accommodation we’d had in Vietnam over a one-month trip (and yet nearly the most expensive). You would have to pay ME to stay in those rooms, and still I wouldn’t accept. We asked for a refund of the first night, since we’d obviously been scammed, but Agoda couldn’t grant us a refund because the hotel “strongly refused” (Agoda’s words). The manager Tam said we could not get a refund as we had “accepted” to stay in the alternative accommodation, as though we were given any choice besides leaving. The dishonesty displayed by the hotel management is alarming.