Review of the Prince II Hotel, Hanoi

The Prince II Hotel is a mid priced hotel in Hanoi’s popular Old Quarter area of the city. This hotel is better than other similar hotels in the same area and it costs more to stay there. The extra is money well spent as the cheaper hotels in the Old Quarter tend to be very poor quality.

Good points about the Prince II Hotel

The main selling point of this hotel is its central location in the heart of the Old Quarter. The hotel is located on Hang Giay Street in the middle of an area with lots of restaurants, bars and shops. The Bach Ma Temple is 110 metres walk away and the Hoan Kiem Lake is 900 metres walk away. You can get better value for money hotels in Hanoi but not in the popular Old Quarter area which is where most of the visitors to the city want to stay.

The second big selling point for this hotel is the quality of the decor and the furniture. This is a smart and stylish hotel. The rooms are really comfortable and well appointed, and the hotel throughout is well maintained. A lot of the other hotels in the area are charming in that they are in are in old buildings with lots of original features but desperately in need of modernisation. Not so at the Prince II Hotel. The hotel has a 2 star rating because it’s a small city centre property with few facilities. The rooms, however, are furnished to a 4 star standard as is the small lobby.

The third thing I liked about this hotel was the standard of the service. The reception staff spoke really good English, they were friendly and couldn’t do enough to help me. They gave me a very early check-in. They phoned the private travel company with whom I had booked an onward bus (and not through the hotel) when they turned up a bit late. They also sent me off with a leaving gift of a nice packet of coffee. Great service all round.

Rooms at the Prince II Hotel

I stayed in one of the standard rooms. The room wasn’t particularly large, 18 sqm, but that is normally for rooms in Hanoi’s Old Quarter area where space is at a premium.

The space was well used, however, with a really comfortable bed and every possible in room amenity the hotel could fit in the room. There was free WiFi, satellite TV with lots of channels, kettle with tea and coffee, in room safe, mini-bar, wardrobe, dressing gown, slippers, and a telephone. I struggled to motivate myself to get up and leave the room because it was so comfortable.

As bathrooms in Vietnamese hotel go this was a good bathroom. It had a separate bath with a shower fitted, reasonably hot water and a hair dryer. Bathrooms in hotels in Vietnam tend to be a weak area, the Prince II Hotel has spent some money modernising its bathrooms and avoided this common problem.

You get a view from the rooms at the Prince II Hotel. Hanoi’s Old Quarter is densely packed with buildings, all pretty much the same height, and there are few hotels in the area where you even get a window, let alone one from which you can see anything other than the wall of the building opposite.

Facilities at the Prince II Hotel

Like most of the buildings in the Old Quarter, the Prince II Hotel has no lift. It does though have a really ornate staircase. If you have difficulties with stairs we recommend that you request to stay on one of the lower floors when you book. There are quite a few stairs to climb to get up to the fifth floor , which is the top floor.

The only communal area in the hotel is the lobby area on the ground floor. In front of the reception desk there is a plenty of seating which is useful because most people travelling onward from Hanoi will arrange a bus service to take them from the city to one of the two most popular destinations, Sapa or Halong Bay, and part of the travelling experience in Vietnam is waiting around for a bus or minivan which will inevitably be a few minutes (or a lot of minutes) late. Behind the reception desk is seating for 8 people at any one time to eat breakfast. Not much seating but it seems to work OK as the hotel only has 20 rooms and a breakfast service which starts at 06:30 and finishes at 09:30.

Location of the Prince II Hotel