Doris Cruise

You do not board this ship at the pier. You board a small boat at the pier and ride it out, and one guest puts that leg at forty-five to sixty minutes each way while other boats load their passengers directly. A second guest describes the same two-stage boarding without timing it: away from the quay around midday in a tender, back onto a tender the next morning to return. Budget the day around that, because it is roughly two hours of your trip and nobody advertises it.

There is a naming problem you should know about too. This boat has a sister called Doria, the names differ by one letter, and at least one guest reports being told to move off the newer Doria or lose the booking. The business listing is registered as Doris Cruise Ha Long Bay and every guest review we hold calls it Doris, so search under that name rather than the operator’s. Then get the hull typed onto your confirmation, because one letter is not much of a safeguard.

What holds up and what does not

The bay is Lan Ha on a single source. A guest who graded the trip category by category makes the same point at length: this is not a run around Ha Long but a circuit of Lan Ha, with less commercial and tourist traffic on the water. That matches, but a review is not a source, so the bay stays operator-stated.

A pool, a jacuzzi, a spa, kayaking and balconies are all independently confirmed. The gym is the operator’s word alone, as is the steel hull and the 2022 launch date. Hold on to that year, because it does not sit easily with the reviews below.

The cabin count is the worst spread of any figure we hold on this ship. Sources say 24, 10, 20 and 18. Capacity is given as 52 guests by the operator and nobody else, which is roughly workable against 24 cabins and impossible against 10. Cabin size comes back as 35, 45, 60 and 70 m², and we are not going to pick one. Nobody publishes the deck count, the length of the ship, or the departure pier.

That last one deserves a sentence, because Ha Long has three and drivers get them wrong. Tuan Chau Marina and the Ha Long International Cruise Port are about twenty minutes apart; Hon Gai sits over the Bai Chay bridge on the far side of the water. Ask which, and repeat it to whoever drives you.

We cannot tell you what a room costs

Nobody publishes a rate sheet for this ship that we have found. No cabin list either, which means no grade names, no bed configurations, no sizes tied to a room you could ask for. Of the 87 boats we publish, 77 come with a one-night per-cabin price and the date we read it, and two more have only a three-day rate. Doris is one of the eight with no price at all, so the price is on request.

Get a written quote for a named cabin on a named date before you form any view of the value.

Where it costs you

We collected 175 reviews, 91 of them in English, and read them. A hundred and eight are five-star. Fourteen are one-star and eight are two-star, so thirteen per cent sits at the bottom, and another seventeen sit at three stars. That three-star band is unusually full for a boat scoring 9.5, and it is where the most useful writing is.

The split is not about taste. It is about which cabin you were given. One five-star guest describes rooms that felt very new and impeccably clean. A two-star guest, on the same ship, reports stained walls, linen that had not been changed and a bathtub that clearly had not been cleaned. Another at two stars describes a persistent damp smell and trouble with the air conditioning, and says the ship looked appealing in photographs and tired in person. For a hull the operator dates to 2022, that is a lot of wear, and we cannot reconcile the two.

The rest of the low reviews are specific and worth having. WiFi is graded a straight fail by the guest who scored every category. Food draws the same note repeatedly: a good breakfast buffet, and dinners that guests call bland, with one saying there is no fine dining on board whatever the listing suggests. Space is tight at the evening event, where a guest says they had to stand. And more than one guest reports the crew failing to keep order among loud passengers, letting inconsiderate guests carry on regardless of who else was affected.

One guest booked the newer Doria through an agent and says they were required to move to this older ship or have the booking cancelled. That is the kind of substitution worth asking about in advance, because it is the one complaint on the file you can protect yourself against with a sentence in an email.

There are further one-star reviews making allegations about how the company behaves that we have no means of checking, and we are not going to repeat them. Read the one-star reviews yourself. With 175 on the file there is plenty to go at, and half an hour there will tell you more than any average.

The good reviews are large in number and consistent about the crew, the balcony views and the jacuzzi. One of them carries our favourite line on the file: a guest who liked everything else notes that the dressing gowns and flip-flops were cut too short for a tall person.

Who it suits

Travellers who want the quieter side of the archipelago, who are willing to enquire rather than book off a listing, and who will not be upset by an hour on a tender at each end. Start with how the three bays differ, then look at what else runs in Lan Ha Bay and on the Lan Ha list.

Who should look elsewhere

Anyone who needs to compare prices properly before committing. Without a rate sheet this boat cannot be put alongside the others honestly, and the best-value list contains ships where we can show you the cabin figure and the date it was read.