Amour Cruise, Ha Long

We had such an amazing experience with Peony Cruises. The food was delicious and they even cooked costume food for gluten free diet! You also have happy hour. The crew is very professional specially Huie and Cherry who made us a wonderful stay on the cruise for our honeymoon :) The view is just stunning. The rooms look new and are very clean.

I could write an essay about our stay with Peony Cruise this February. But in a few words everything was perfect, the room, food and above all the staff. Everyone was both kind and proffesional (especialy Hieu and Cherry) so we enjoyed every second of the trip. We will deffinitelly repeat the trip, next time maybe two nights.

booked the 3d2n cruise with peony in late december. overall pretty up to expectations. they do mix the people who are on 2d1n and 3d2n itineraries on the same boat. food was gooooood. quality buffets for breakfast and lunch. set menu for dinner. happy hour in the evenings, 1 for 1 cocktails and house pours. on the second day, we went on another small day cruise boat, joined other people. visited the viet hai village and some other activities. overall :)

We stayed on Peony 1 between the 18th and 20th January. We are left with conflicted feelings about our stay aboard Peony Cruises. The communication before joining the cruise is abysmal. I text, emailed and called the representative "Alice" two weeks before our departure date to get basic information about when the cruise was leaving and from where. I had radio silence until the night before we were set to leave this was obviously very stressful as we were unsure we would even be able to do the cruise. On arrival we had a pleasant time there was vegetarian options and they catered for us well there was a good atmosphere and the room was lovely. Our cruise manager Cherry was super nice and deserves mentioning for her customer service. On the first night she gave us all a debrief and said that before any activity there would be an announcement 10 minutes before to make sure we didn't miss anything. 2 days into our cruise Cherry left our boat to go on holiday and our cruise manager changed. This was the night before our last day so we thought nothing of it and assumed things would continue the way they had. Unfortunately the next day we were due to visit some caves. We were told we would be leaving at 7:15am. We made sure to get ready and eat breakfast before setting off. We made our way to the dock in the cruise and nothing was happening so we decided to go to our room thinking that an announcement would be made 10 minutes before departure as Cherry had done our whole trip. No announcement was made and at 7:45 we decided to poke our head out the door as it had been a while. We could see that couples were boarding the boat to go so we left our room and proceeded to walk towards the boat as we were approaching the boat suddenly jolted off and left us behind despite our protests to stop. As we paid £200+ for this we were not happy. We missed 1/3 of our cruise experience because of this mismanagement. When the couple's returned they told us they asked the manager to bring the boat back to get us and he refused. We confronted the manager with this information and he lied to our face saying that he didn't realise we wanted to go and no one said anything. Despite us voicing our frustrations nothing was done to rectify the situation. As a result of this I feel compelled to leave this review. If you're paying a lot of money for this experience you should be able to experience it in full.

POSITIVES: – the boat is beautiful, we had a relaxing stay in our cabin – the itinerary is packed with activities so no time to be bored – the drinks were yum NEGATIVES: – this is a comment about all boats, not this cruise exclusively: although they advertise it as "2 days 1 night" experience, in reality it's about 23h, less than 1 day – not a deal breaker of course, but something to have in mind when booking – the food was rather bland – I understand they try to cater to western guests but it felt like the management was not letting the chef shine – there are additional payments on top of the booking price – again not a deal breaker but good to be aware