Diana Cruise

Fifty-six cabins makes Diana one of the larger boats working Lan Ha, and the only English review we hold for it is one word long. The word is “Diana”. Five stars, nothing else attached.

So this page is a rate sheet and a set of blanks.

Six grades, and the gap inside them

The cabin count is verified against more than the operator’s word. Their own grade list is where it gets interesting. Fourteen senior cabins sit on the first deck, sixteen executive on the second, sixteen premier on the third, and there are two suites apiece on the upper two decks, named for Ha Long and for Lan Ha. Those come to fifty rooms.

The sixth grade is the junior balcony with a partial view. It is the cheapest room on the rate table and no source gives a count for it. Six is what the arithmetic leaves over. We are not going to print six as a specification, since nobody published it, but note what follows: the cheapest cabin on this ship belongs to the one grade the operator describes least. No floor area, no deck, no bed layout.

Grade sizes rest on the operator alone. 34 m² for the senior, 36 for the executive, 38 for the premier, 55 for either suite. Nobody publishes the length of the hull, the passenger capacity, the deck count or the year the boat entered service, and we looked for all four. The grade list does name a first, second and third deck, so there are at least three, which is as far as it can honestly be taken.

Two entries in that list contradict each other, and both of them cost money. The executive cabin is described with a triple bed while the rate table caps the executive balcony at two guests. The Lan Ha suite, joint-largest at 55 m² and the dearest room on the sheet, is listed as having a private balcony and no view. Get an answer on that second one before paying $540 for it.

What a cabin costs

From a published rate table read on 6 August 2026, per cabin, two guests, one night: the junior balcony is $336, the senior $340, the executive $360, the premier $390. The Ha Long suite is $450 and the Lan Ha suite $540. Those are the highest rates published rather than a tariff the operator stands behind, so read them as a ceiling and expect a quote to come in under them.

The per-person figure listings advertise is $168, taken from listings on 7 August 2026 and corroborated nowhere. Double it. $336, which is the junior cabin to the dollar. Our reading is that $168 was never a fare anyone quotes: it is a cabin price halved by a listing engine, and planning a budget around it will mislead you. The same scrape runs as high as $363 a head.

What is on board

A spa, kayaking, private balconies and a gym are verified across sources rather than resting on the operator’s claim. The pool and the jacuzzi are the operator’s word alone, though one of their own photographs shows a deck pool with the ship’s name painted on the structure beside it, so a pool exists. How big it is, we do not know.

The route, which we do not have

We hold no itinerary for Diana. No stop list, no timings, no named cave. That is a real gap on this side of the archipelago, because Lan Ha loops vary between operators far more than the Ha Long ones do. Cat Ba National Park, the village at Viet Hai and the Tra Bau water appear on some two-day programmes and not others, and the difference is most of your second day. Ask for the stops before you pay a deposit, and if the bay itself is still undecided, the three are not interchangeable.

Where it boards

Nobody publishes that either. Not the operator, not any listing we read, which is strange for a ship this size. It matters because Ha Long has three plausible answers and a driver will guess. Tuan Chau Marina and the Ha Long International Cruise Port are about twenty minutes apart in traffic; Hon Gai Pier is the third, across the Bai Chay bridge. Make the operator write the pier name down, and read it back to whoever is driving you.

What we cannot do for you

Two reviews collected. One in English, one word long. No Google average, no review count, nothing to weigh.

Absence is not a verdict. The likeliest explanation is that Diana fills through agents and domestic channels whose reviews never reach the collections we read, and a boat can be perfectly well run and invisible at the same time. But the signal most travellers lean on hardest is missing here, and we are not going to substitute atmosphere for it. Nobody has told us what the food is like, whether the crew speaks much English, how the kayaking is organised, or what happens when the weather turns. On a 56-cabin ship those things are decided by staffing levels we know nothing about.

Who it suits

Couples who have read the cabin ladder, picked a grade, and are content to judge a boat on hardware and price. $336 for a balcony room on Lan Ha is competitive against the rest of the best-value list, and against the other boats this side it buys a bigger ship than most.

Who should look elsewhere

Anyone for whom reading reviews is part of buying. That is a reasonable way to spend $336 and this boat cannot give you the material for it. Several Lan Ha operators have hundreds of English reviews in the open, and if a thin record would sit badly with you for the whole trip, the money is better spent where the record is thick.