Love it for $120/nite

We were there April'06. our hotel manager from Hoi An booked this hotel for us for $120 a nite including breakfast.

-great location

-awesome breakfast

-nice lobby

-clean

-great pool / view

We enjoyed being there.

fyi, The excursion desk in the lobby is very expensive; do not use them.

Excellent hotel

An excellent hotel with a very high standard of service. Fully recommend the Breakfasts though mini bar more expensive that other hotels in Vietnam. A good location, close to markets and sights.

Beautiful hotel - amazing pool!

Sofitel is a great hotel in saigon city! the lobby s beautiful -the rooms have wonderful touches and the roof top pool is amazing! perfect ion the city heat! we looked at the majestic and they had road works in front of the rooms -would be very noisy and a very noisy road. Great to visit but really glad we stayed at Sofitel. Got excellent rate on line. 2 big shops/ markets near by. $5 for taxi from airport.

15 min walk from ben thanh market -but only 5 minutes to the cathedral. a bit away from the action but the other hotels were as well and we quite liked this area over the river front..

Sofitel-not in the Red Light District

We have just returned from a trip to Vietnam and stayed in the Sofitel in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon). The hotel was much nicer than we expected; we had previously stayed at Sofitels in France which are on par with Holiday or Ramada Inns in the US. The most noteworthy feature of the Sofitel was the location-it was not in the Red Light District as most of the American based hotels are. We had no complaints about the service. The condition of the rooms and public areas were clean and taken care of. After a long day of business and sightseeing we always looked forward to spending afternoons at the rooftop pool. We would positively stay in the Sofitel again and have no reservations about recommending it.

Disappointment

The sofitel in saigon is part of the accor management group, a french company that owns and manages various hotels around europe and asia

In general this group can be relied upon for a great stay , however in this case somehow the organization completely lost its way

while it is listed as a five star hotel, the service, accomodations and general ambience is more reflective of three stars....Thus if they advertised it as such and charged accordingly I would be writing an entirely different review...

Rather than go into excruciating detail about every disappointment in the hotel I would just suggest that you can get alot more bang for your buck by going to the caravelle or the park hyatt

In sum, I hope that in the future the accor group takes greater interest in this hotel and its running and makes it into what it advertises

Nice hotel!

We stayed in this hotel for 3 nights. It is a big hotel, busy with many business(wo)men. The rooms are very nice, not to big and the views are great. The pool on top is excellent. The staff is correct.

For vacation is the location of this hotel perfect, you can walk to every attraction except the chinatown part.

Lovely hotel

We had a lovely stay here. I usually choose an absolutely central location and upon arrival I thought it a bit far but it actually turned out to be only a five minute walk to the city centre and a couple of minutes to Saigon Plaza...a great supermarket and shopping market. Comfortable walking distance to Notre Dame Cathedral, Reunification Palace and Central Post Office. Even the Saigon River was a comfortable walk (if, like me, you enjoy walking). The hotel is on a broad, tree lined street and I really enjoyed being in this area. The buffet breakfast and dinner were superb and reasonably priced - even more so because we are members of the Accor Advantage Plus Club which entitled us to two for one meals. Service was impeccable throughout the hotel. Our room was spotlessly clean and very comfortable with every amenity. I wouldn't say it was absolutely luxurious but I couldn't fault anything and the bed was super comfortable. We had a gorgeous view across the city to the river. The roof top pool is lovely and the service here too, was very good as was the meal we ate by the pool. If you want to be "walk out the door" close to the action and desire real luxury then check out the Caravelle or Sheraton, although I think these would be much more expensive and I would definitely be happy to stay at the Sofitel Plaza again.

Has potential...

My husband and I stayed at the Sofitel in HCMC in Jan 2005 and were somewhat disappointed with our stay. The rooms are very uniquely designed and quite nice, with slippers beside the bed and chocolates at night. Also, the breakfast buffet is truly divine with an amazingly large variety of food/dishes catering to HCMC's european, north american and asian clientele. However, beware the pool hotel: it was closed on both days of our stay for the entire afternoon and evening for "private" functions and this without any prior notice. We were not the only guests who complained and were met with a simple "Sorry" from the reception/concierge. Service was not quite what I would have expected from a hotel in this category and its location makes quite a long walk to most of the shopping/restaurants in District 1. Our preferred choice would be the Caravelle.