About.com Rating

The Victory Hotel is a good budget-to-moderate hotel option when in Hue, Vietnam - in exchange for being some distance from the Hue Citadel, you get a comfortable room with passably swift Wi-Fi internet access and a decent breakfast buffet.

The Victory Hotel offers a fair trade in this writer's opinion - nothing exceptional, but exceedingly great value.

Location of Victory Hotel, Hue

I looked up Victory Hotel a day before I was due to take the train from Hanoi.

I had added an extra day to my Hue itinerary, and my first choice could not accommodate my revised schedule.

Shame, because I had wanted to stay close to Hue's backpacker district around Pham Ngu Lao. No other vacancy nearby fit my desired location or desired price; I was going to have to look further afield.

To be fair, Victory Hotel isn't that far - its location on Nguyen Huu Tho Street is a ten-minute drive away from the Hue train station, and about five minutes or so from the backpacker district. A taxi ride from the riverside to Victory Hotel will set you back a tiny VND 15,000 (a few cents shy of a dollar).

The location isn't very touristy - but you can look at it as a plus. Victory Hotel is set in a commercial-residential neighborhood with a low-to-middling traffic in foreigners and pesky xe om drivers.

The adjacent Truong Chin Street offers a few cheap eats and a massage parlor, but walk to the corner of Ba Trieu Street, turn left, and you'll encounter the massive (for Vietnam) Phong Phu Plaza shopping mall, with its Western-style department store, grocery, and food court.

Victory Hotel's Rooms

So is the location worth it? No, if 24-7 easy access to the backpacker district is your gold standard for accommodation in Hue. Yes, if money's tight but you'd like a level of comfort far above what your budget seems to fit. Trust me, your money goes a long way in Victory Hotel.

Start with the deluxe room I got for about $21 a night. That was supposed to be $23, but I got a small discount for checking in alone.

Low-season room rates at the Victory Hotel range from $20 for a standard room, to $38 for an executive suite. (High season rates are about ten dollars higher). The Victory Hotel has 22 guestrooms in all - classified as standard, deluxe, family suite, and executive suite.

The deluxe room was about eighty square feet in area, with a high ceiling and intimate yellow lighting. The décor was influenced by Vietnamese and Chinese Imperial style, with a surfeit of lacquered wood, but still felt new and unseasoned.

Bathroom is clean, with a bathtub (not a shower stall), hot water, towels, flip-flops, and free shampoo, soap, toothbrush/toothpaste, and comb. Sadly, the toothpaste is the same green, generic, chemical-tasting toothpaste that seems to come standard in Vietnamese budget hotels, so I pass.

The site says the deluxe room gets a standard city view, i.e. "not much"; the room looks out to the east of Hue, over a dusty parking lot and side road. Other rooms looking to the northwest have a substantially better view, overlooking a new civic project some distance away, sprouting in some fallow fields.

Victory Hotel's Room Amenities

At the foot of the bed is the lacquered wood desk which integrates into the TV stand and receptacle for the mini-bar. The desk is some distance away from a power outlet, which will nettle laptop users with a short cord. The Wi-Fi signal from this part of the room is middling-to-good (about 30% signal strength on average, which works for me).

The television is a standard CRT with a 30-inch flat screen; the cable television package includes CNN, BBC World, Cartoon Network (great for the kiddies), and an assortment of local and French-language channels. (Executive suite comes with 32" LCD TVs.)

The deluxe room comes with access to the fifth-floor buffet breakfast, Wi-Fi access, and free use of bicycle.

Victory Hotel's Breakfast Buffet and Other Services

The free fifth floor buffet breakfast is a simple bread-based spread; lots of baguettes, croissants, white bread, cottage cheese, jam, ham, fried eggs, and fruit.

Don’t forget the coffee - the buffet seems designed to be washed down with coffee. A gas range sits on the buffet table, manned by staff who will cook your eggs the way you like them.

After 10am, all bets are off; the hotel does not serve any food after those hours, although the front desk does have a takeout menu for a nearby Italian restaurant handy.

At the compact front-desk lobby, you can help yourself to some value-added services like access to Internet via one of the lobby's two dedicated PCs, laundry service, and currency exchange (at good rates, comparable to bank rates - you don't feel like you've been taken advantage of here).

Outbound visitors can arrange for an air-conditioned open tour bus to pick you up at the hotel if you're headed to nearby Hoi An (this service cost $4, payable to the front desk).

The human factor shouldn't be overlooked - as a guest, I felt that the staff was truly looking out for me. The Victory Hotel's staff is extremely friendly (although their English isn't very good - you'll have to repeat yourself a few times). In often-stoic Vietnam, that attitude is refreshing, and goes a long, long way.

Victory Hotel - Information

• Rates: $21-$24
• Address: 08 Nguyen Huu Tho Street, Hue City, Vietnam
• Phone: +84 54 814770, +84 54 817338
• Email:info@victoryhotelhue.com
• Site:www.victoryhotelhue.com