Minh Tai Hotel — Hotel in Mỹ Tho

Minh Kieu Hotel Review||Period of Stay: 02-23-16 to 02-28-16||||Address: Số 2 Thủ Khoa Huân, Phường 1, tp. Mỹ Tho, Tiền Giang, Vietnam
Phone: 073 626 2288 (in country)||||GPS Coordinates: Lat: 10° 21.371’, Long: 106° 21.721’||||This is a review of the hotel and room #301, a Double Room||||We make an obligatory trip to My Tho annually to celebrate New Years with older extended family. We were last in My Tho town almost a year ago, when we stayed at the Tien Giang Hotel. In previous years, we have also stayed at the Song Tien, Minh Quan and Chuong Duong Hotels. Unfortunately, My Tho isn’t full of great hotels in my opinion. There is a new 4-star hotel in town but it doesn’t command the over $100/night prices for a room in a small delta town. The Minh Kieu is probably the best hotel in My Tho we’ve encountered to date.||||Like many other hotels in Viet Nam, this one is also dimly lighted. As you enter the hotel, you may get the feeling it might be closed or there is a power outage. Common areas and reception appear almost morgue-like. Common areas on the first floor and hallways above need new carpeting or new tiles floors. The worn, torn, stale, old red carpets need to go.||||As Tet was over, there were plenty of vacant rooms at the Minh Kieu. We chose the least expensive room facing the street on the third floor, a Double Room. The rate was 500,000d per night including breakfast and taxes. That worked out to $22.31 (USD). (Pictures of rooms on most web sites are taken with very wide angle lenses giving one the impression the room is much larger than it is in reality.) Read the number of square feet or meters of the room you are buying to calculate what the true size of the room might be. 20 sq. meters or less for a room is pretty tight when you consider it probably includes the bathroom. The information is typically available on sites like agoda.com under ‘room info’. I think the room we chose was around 25 sq. meters.||||Room||||So room #301 is on the third floor. However, it was actually four floors off street level. The reception area and the area used to serve morning breakfast is up one flight of concrete steps up from street level.||||Our room contained a few pieces of the standard wooden furniture, probably popular almost 100 years ago, including one small night table, two wooden chairs, a small coffee table, a small dressing table with mirror, a cabinet with a refrigerator inside stocked with canned beverages and a lockable armoire with keys. ||||An LED flat-screen TV sat on top of the cabinet that contained the refrigerator. ||||The refrigerator was stocked with a few beverages and on the lowest setting before it would be turned off. I move it up to the next to highest setting to cool some of my own beverages brought in from the outside. There was a thick build up of ice in the small freezer containing a small ice tray. Here were some of the prices of drinks for cans in the refrigerator:||||Half liter bottle water - 10,000d (none in refrigerator)||1.5 liter bottle water - 20,000d (none in refrigerator)||333 beer can - 20,000d||Heineken can - 30,000d||Pepsi, 7-Up, Twister cans - 15,000d||Red Bull can - 20,000d||||The two cans of 333 beer in refrigerator had brew dates that were eight months old and certainly not fresh. I found it odd the hotel does not supply two free bottles of water a day per room but there were none even to be purchased from the refrigerator. The room was cheap but a small, decent bottle of water should cost the hotel no more than 3,000d or 13 cents!||||The included WiFi was pretty decent at this hotel with consistent 20 Mbps down and up speeds, the best encountered in My Tho to date. Internet speeds can vary if you don’t connect to the right wireless AP in the hallway. Try several and run speedtest.net . Ideally, the one on your floor will offer the best speeds.||||The room description and features listed on agoda.com for the date of stay were accurate.||||Bathroom||||The bathroom is pretty standard for this type of hotel and quite small (see photos). This room only had a shower, which was fine with us. As an added bonus, it had a rain shower head in addition to the hand unit. The bathroom had a standard flush toilet with a bidet hose. Two medium and two large bath towels for two people a day. Amenities included a small tube of shampoo and bath gel, a plastic comb, two toothbrushes, and cheap earbuds. There was also a wall-attached two cup holder for two glasses in the bathroom and one was empty. But most important, the bathroom was spotlessly clean and did not stink.||||Inclusive Breakfast||||The room rate included a basic breakfast in the morning. The included breakfast consisted of one entrée from the breakfast menu, like baguette and fried eggs or noodle soup and one drink. Here’s a sampling of the breakfast items with prices if you wanted more than one or extras:||||1-Hủ tiếu Mỹ Tho (rice noodle soup, My Tho style), or||2-Banh Canh Suon Heo (noodles with pork rib), or||3-Bánh canh sườn heo (stir fried noodles with beef), or||4-Mì gói xào nấu bò/trung (instant noodles with beef/eggs), or ||5-Bánh mì ốp la (fried eggs with bread), or||6-Bánh mì cá mòi (bread with sardines)||||If you wanted more than one of the above, the extra was priced at 25,000-30,000d. ||||And, one of the following from the beverage list:||||1-Black coffee with cream or sugar (Vietnamese style coffee with condensed milk), or ||2-Lemonade (something like a soda chanh but without the soda), or||3-Tea (Lipton tea bag and hot water), or||4-Soy milk||||Alternatively, there was an excellent Cơm tấm place across the street (Quan Com Nam Trieu). For 15,000d or about 67 cents, one can get a take away styrofoam box filled with rice, pork, shredded carrot, cucumber, daikon radish and small packet of fish sauce on the side. Go well before 9 AM or they will likely be sold out. Add a Ca phe da (Vietnamese iced coffee) and for little more than a dollar you have a great breakfast meal!||||It’s not a buffet, if that what’s you are looking for, but a basic meal to get your day started. ||||Positives: ||||1-Clean bed linen||2-Clean bathroom and adequate towels||3-Plenty of hot water for bathing||4-Bath amenities including toothbrushes, plastic comb, shampoo, bath gel, very small soap bar, earbuds||5-Adequate LG air-conditioner||6-Hot water cooker, teapot, and small cups ||7-Clean, smooth tile floors (no dirty, stained carpets)||8-No sewage smell coming up through bath floor drains||9-Fairly decent room lighting (LED)||10-Cable TV had dozens of local channels (Vietnamese) and selection of western channels including:||||25-FOX Sports HD||26-FOX 2 Sports HD||27-HBO (Vietnamese speech over subdued English - irritating)||28-Starworld||29-Discovery||30-CINEMAX||31-Movies HD||32-Cartoon Network (Vietnamese speech over subdued English)||36-VTV||49-AXN HD||62-HTV 7||69-National Geographic||74-Animal Planet||75-MTV||76-f||||Limited channels in French||||Negatives:||||1-Standard rooms are pretty small but adequate for a few overnight stays (get the triple room if there is more than two of you)||2-Armoire type closet with lockable door but did not function properly||3-No room safe||4-Hotel staff would not provide a second key in the event one person was out and the other was in but sleeping||5-Free bottles of drinking water not offered and none for sale in refrigerator (but liters bottles on the street and bring back to the hotel)||6-Little English spoken here but you can probably get by asking questions during daytime reception desk hours, when somebody get the idea of what you’re asking for||||Summary||||Of all the hotels I’ve stayed at in My Tho, this one has been the best so far. It deserves a solid three stars on average and a fourth star for value. Yes, the common areas and hallways have that crappy, dark red, stained, worn out carpet, but that’s trivial to the value proposition. For me, a room needs to have a clean bed with clean sheets. Ideally the room will have tiled floors. (I hate rooms with tired, dirty, moldy, stained carpets!) The bathroom needs to be spotless or as clean as possible. Drains should not stink. It needs to deliver adequate hot water day or night and a minimum of two towels per person per day (one medium and one large per person). A working and reliable internet service is also a must but I stress reliable. This hotel provided all that.||||If you need something better, the new MeKong My Tho Hotel is waiting for you just around the corner. It’s nice, it’s new, it has a pool. Rooms start at around $115/night with taxes and service. This room, as I said earlier, offered a lot for less than $25/night, net, net. It is probably the best of the five hotels we’ve stayed at thus far. It’s a solid 3-star hotel for this area, and I would stay here again if only based on value for money.||||As I always say, unless you have some compelling reason to stay in this town, move on to Sai Gon for...

We booked this hotel for a nights stay on our trip to the mekong delta. We read the negative reviews in tripadvisor, but still managed to leave disappointed. |Upon our arrival we were nicely greeted, however even before we managed to check in, the manager was already trying to make a sell for a boat trip starting less than an hour away. We declined and checked in. |As stated in a previous review, this hotel tries to keep hold of your passport until check out, which we disagreed with. This happened without any issues, they wrote all the details down and we paid for the room upfront. ||When we left our room, we were once again pitched the boat tour and declined. If you believe it or not, the next morning they knocked at our door at 7am in order to wake us up for the 8am boat trip. ||Being woken up wouldn't have been that much of an issue, If we'd been able to get any sleep. The hotel is very loud especially in the late evening and in the morning you can hear the staff as well as fellow travelers. And during the night, there's one lorry after the other reversing into the wet market for fish deliveries with an unbelievably annoying 'for elise' reverse tune.||Please note, the rooms do not come with a hairdryer, I pod docking station and minibar, not all rooms have a balcony and there is no dining area or kettle either. This is incorrectly advertised on...

When arriving in My Tho, this is the hotel where our moto-taxi dropped us. The price was reasonable (250000 dongs, ie 10$, for a twin room with A/C), with wifi and a good enough spot to visit the city. The place is quite noisy from 5am due to the street traffic. The main problem comes from the hotel manager who will be VERY insistent that you book a tour with his company. We left him in quite a bad mood when we told him we just wanted a bus to Can Tho (a city 100km from there). The booked bus was supposed to be a private bus with A/C... We ended up the next morning on the side of the road with one of the manager's goon who just flagged a random bus. This bus did end up in Can Tho, but it certainly didn't have A/C and was packed to the gills with people smoking and we paid 4 times the normal price. The hotel manager will also tell you he needs to keep your passport until you check out (which is a lie) and that his hotel has excellent reviews on Agoda (where it is not even mentioned) and on trip advisor (where, at the time of writing, there are only 4...