Amanda Cruise

The cheapest cabin on Amanda’s published rate table is $450 for two people for one night. The figure listings advertise is $118 each. Nothing in the operator’s own numbers gets you from one to the other.

The rate table, and what it gives away

Read on 6 August 2026, per cabin, one night: the deluxe is $450, the junior suite $490, the senior suite $510, the royal suite $550. Two triples sit above them, the triple deluxe at $670 and the triple junior suite at $730, each taking three guests. Those are the highest rates published rather than a tariff, so a real quote should land under them.

Now divide. The deluxe works out at $225 a head and the triple deluxe at $223. The junior suite is $245 a head and the triple junior suite $243. Two grades, two bed counts, the same money per person to within two dollars. What that tells you is that the sheet was built per person and then written out per cabin, which has one practical consequence: there is no couple’s discount here, and the third bed is not the cheap way to travel that it is on some boats. It is a bed at full price.

It also means the operator’s own arithmetic puts this boat between $223 and $245 a head. The $118 came off listings on 7 August 2026, we could not corroborate it anywhere, and it is a shade over half of the lowest number the rate table supports. The same scrape tops out at $247, which is the only end of that range we would treat as plausible.

What is confirmed, and what nobody says

Twenty-five cabins, verified beyond the operator’s word. Every cabin has a private balcony, verified. A spa, verified. Kayaking is included and verified, which is worth stating because it is the inclusion most quietly dropped between the listing and the day. There is a gym on the operator’s word alone. The hull is steel and the launch year is 2022, again from the operator with nothing to check it against.

No source we read mentions a pool. None mentions a jacuzzi either. This boat sits in our luxury bracket at $450 a room, so that silence is worth a moment: it is not proof there is no water on deck, but do not book expecting it, and if a listing shows you a pool, ask which ship the photograph came from. Capacity, deck count and hull length are all unpublished. We looked.

Cabin size is a mess

Four sources give a standard cabin floor area. One pair says 20 m², another 25, another 35, and another 60. Two sources each, no tie-break, and a threefold spread between the ends. None of them states which grade it is describing. The comfortable guess is that 20 is the deluxe and 60 is the royal suite, and we are not going to write a guess into a specification. Ask for the square metres of the grade you are actually booking, in writing.

The grade list has a second hole in it. Twenty-five rooms are divided across six grades and no source gives a count for any grade. So you cannot tell whether the $450 deluxe is eighteen of those rooms or two of them, and that is the difference between a genuine entry price and a number that is never available on the dates you want.

No itinerary, and no pier

We hold no stop list for this boat. Not a cave, not a village, not a timing. Ha Long Bay routes are more standardised than the Cat Ba ones, so the risk of an unpleasant surprise is lower here than it would be elsewhere, but a two-day programme with nothing published is still a two-day programme you are buying blind. If you have not fixed on a bay, they differ more than the listings suggest.

The departure point is not published either. Ask for it by name and write it down, because Ha Long offers a driver three wrong answers: Tuan Chau Marina and the Ha Long International Cruise Port are twenty minutes apart, and Hon Gai Pier sits over the Bai Chay bridge from both.

The 9.7 has nothing behind it

Google shows 9.7 from sixteen reviews. We collected none of them, in any language, so what this page holds is a number and no evidence.

Sixteen is small enough to do the arithmetic on. Those ratings carry about 155 points between them; one guest scoring the trip two out of ten drops the average to roughly 9.2, and two of them take it under 9. A score that moves half a point on a single bad night is not measuring reliability, it is measuring luck so far. For a 25-cabin ship the operator says has been sailing since 2022, sixteen published ratings is also fewer than we would expect from four seasons of guests. We cannot tell you why. It may be that Amanda sells through agents and domestic channels that never generate a public review, which is common here and says nothing about the boat.

Who it suits

Couples and threes who want a recent steel hull with a balcony on the main bay, who have a written quote against a named grade, and who are not relying on other people’s accounts to make the decision. Priced against the rest of the best-value list, $450 for the room is mid-table rather than cheap.

Who should look elsewhere

Anyone treating 9.7 as a fact about how the trip goes. Sixteen ratings with no readable text underneath is thinner evidence than a 9.1 from four hundred, and on this bay there are boats with hundreds of English reviews open to read at the same money.