Vietnam forum

Thank you lescott for your answer. But unfortunately the 25 Dollars are not the fee we have to pay to the Hotel, this is only 2 Dollars, but the fee we have to pay to our bank in order to have them transfer the money abroad :-(.

I have also booked a four night stay at Hanoi Elegance 2 for coming November and followed the same booking procedure (used the authorization letter). FYI we paid a deposit of 100$. No problems so far.

Hi joha - I was equally suspicious when asked to scan and send my passport and back & front of my credit card. My Bank advised me against this, adding that no refund could be sought through MasterCard if services were not provided.

I did find other agents and hotels who allowed money transfer into an Australian based bank account (local HCMC branch).

Hi daawgon - how did you find Zoom.com , as far as service and reliability?

Has anyone else used Zoom??

Hi Joha -
We're booked into the same hotel (HE2) and they've asked us for USD500 deposit for 3 suites, 3 nights and cruises.
I am a bit worried myself... very hesitant to go ahead with it....
We're thinking of calling Visa and "re-approving" the amount, making them aware that there should not be anymore transactions after that. I don't know if that's possible...

Hi,

just back from 4 wonderful weeks in Vietnam I wanted to give some feedback about the deposit and Hanoi Elegance Hotel.

wanting to stay exactly in this hotel we nonetheless payed the deposit with the creditcard form by email.

and to cut a long story short: and everything went well.

about 10 days after the mail, the specified amount was deducted from my account. After arriving in the hotel they first pointed out, that they had deducted this amount and would not use the form for further deductions (e.g. the complete payment for our stay).

we had some wonderful days in the hotel. and working for service quality improvement in tourism here in Germany, I found the staff excellently trained and just wonderful.

With that kind of professionalism in the hotel, and all the things we have experienced there, I would say, that one can trust this hotel in all matters.

so thanks for all the responses. And a such as wonderful days in Vietnam as we had to everybody :-)

Joha

I have encountered this on Bali. After some consideration, I cheerfully sent the required photocopies.

It feels risky and intrusive, but ultimately you are only sharing what would otherwise easily be accessible to the merchant: card #, expiry date, and security code that you probably regularly share with online merchants anyway, and (at worst) a rather poor specimen of your signature, which any institution where you buy using your credit card in person would also have.

What I do, however, is whenever travelling in a region with heightened incidence of scams and fraud, I use only my secondary credit card. That way if anything happens I will report it has been compromised and there will be minimal headache in changing pre-authorized billing, etc. I've had to do this once - have no idea if credit card was compromised by giving the # as a guarantee, or by being swiped by someone somewhere. It took 2 10 min calls and one signed form letter to get rid of the junk and get a CC with new number assigned.