Galaxy Airport Hotel — Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City

Stay here to experience what an 'average' Vietnamese hotel looks like.

Indifferent staff who spends 90% of their day looking at their phone (sound on). Things that need regular maintainance, not maintained (broken bidet, shower head, sink loose, etc.). Clean at glance, dirty on inspection.

We have spent over a month in Vietnam now, and this is just the baseline. People in service are good at following rules, doing what is in their job description, and outside of that not giving a sh*t.

It takes some practice to find the good places and the chill people. Vietnam is beautiful and we love it, but there's a lot of trauma in this country and stress levels are high.

Protip when looking for a place to stay: Check out hoodmaps.com, and pick your approximate neighborhood. Go on Google Maps and search for +4.5 rated restaurants in that neighborhood. Good hotels are typically near good restaurants. Go on booking.com and search for hotels +8 rating in that neighborhood. Select the map view, and click through places until you find a couple that fits your need. Go back on Google Maps and read the 10-20 most recent reviews from each place. Recency matters because seasonality is a HUGE factor in how people experience a place. Be aware that a good % of reviews are fake AI generated reviews. The fake ones typically give very general descriptions of the place, rather than personal...

Very close to airport so that's why you stay here. Elevator for luggage up to higher floors. They said they will hold a bag for us while we travel out of HCM which is nice.

Originally booked on Agoda then extended in person slightly cheaper for 2 rooms, 1 with window and 1 without.

One thing that was interesting was that they messaged before the stay to ask arrival time. We replied 2-3 meaning PM in English, should have said 14:00-1500. They notified us a few days in advance they could not check us in at 2am and asked us to find another hotel, which is when we realized our mistake and the 14:00 check in was no problem.

So if arriving super late on an international flight, they are not set up for that. Also, if you are going to be jet lagged, grumpy or not ready to communicate with someone who's native language is Viet, pay a lot more money and go to a large international hotel chain.

We've been very happy here, rooms clean, guests appear to respect the no durian/no smoking signs etc. Staff has been very nice. So nice surprise for us, but we speak some Viet and have been in country for a while, so maybe not the typical foreign guest getting off a long haul flight and by heat, bags, language...

I mean it's alright... Just booked it to spend a night for the layover in the airport, it's just okay for that, clean, wifi works well, not really far.

Important - Just to mention if you want to mention if you also considering to spend a night for a layover - it's not an issue of this hotel at all, but road infrastructure in SCMC near airport is just laughable, basically there is NO way for you to cross this intersection between airport and this neighbourhood with the hotel properly on foot lol. There is just NO crossings there 🤡🤡. You'll HAVE to either get a taxi for a 3 minute drive just to get to another side of intersection, or you'll do like I and couple of locals did - and just run across several roads right in the middle of the road to get there. Unbelievable and shame on authorities for allowing such situation to happen, but well, HCMC airport is the worst I've ever been to, so it's also unsurprising heh. And don't believe random Grab drivers nearby who will say you can't do it because police will get you for that so you have to...