Hermes Cruise

Eighteen cabins, four grades on the rate sheet, and all four of them are called suites. The cheapest is $320 for the room. The per-person figure listings advertise is $160, which is that $320 halved to the dollar.

Nobody has reviewed this boat in English. Nobody has reviewed it in any language we collect.

Four grades priced, nine in the operator’s own table

From a rate table read on 6 August 2026, per cabin, two guests, one night: the junior suite is $320, the senior suite $350, the royal suite $470, and the president suite $570. Each takes two. Those are the highest rates published rather than a tariff the operator stands behind, so a genuine quote ought to come in under them.

Divide by two and the ladder reads $160, $175, $235 and $285 a head. The first is the figure listings advertise, scraped from listings on 7 August 2026 and corroborated nowhere. That match is not a coincidence. The sheet calls $320 the highest rate anyone had published, not a fare. So the price on this boat is a ceiling, halved, then presented to you as a floor. The same scrape reaches $330 a head, which would put two people above the president suite.

No source gives a count for any of the four grades. Eighteen rooms, four names, and no way to tell whether the $320 junior suite is a dozen of them or one.

Then there is the ninth room. One of the operator’s own images is not a picture of the boat at all. It is a photograph of a specification table listing nine room types, with bed configuration, capacity, deck, floor area and even balcony dimensions for each. Nine. The rate sheet prices four. We hold a description of that table’s columns and not the numbers inside them, so we cannot say which nine exist or which four you are allowed to book. Ask for the table as a file.

Cabin size is a three-way tie

Eleven sources give a standard cabin area and produce four answers. Three say 28 m². Three say 30. Three say 47. Two say 33. Three of those are level on source count, so there is no winner to nominate, and the gap between 28 and 47 is not a rounding difference. It is a different room. Get the square metres for the grade printed on your invoice.

What checks out

Eighteen cabins is verified beyond the operator’s word, and it is the only hard specification here. Private balconies, verified. A jacuzzi, verified. A spa, verified. Kayaking included and verified, which earns a mention because it is the inclusion most often dropped between the listing and the morning it should happen.

There is a pool, and only the operator says so. Same for the gym, the steel hull and the 2022 launch. Even the bay rests on their word alone: no independent source we read confirms this ship works Ha Long rather than the Cat Ba side, which is unusual for a boat sold on its location. Capacity, deck count and hull length are unpublished. We looked for all three.

No route, and a beach we cannot name

We hold no itinerary. Not a cave, not a village, not a timing. The main Ha Long channel is more standardised than the Lan Ha loops, so the risk of a surprise is lower here than further west, but two days with nothing published is two days bought on trust.

The photographs give up a little. Three of the six we hold are of a beach: umbrellas and a volleyball net, a Vietnamese flag, a wooden pier with tenders tied to it, an aerial of a small wooded island with a pink-roofed building at the summit. So there is a beach stop, on an island with a landing. Which island, we do not know. If the bay is still open for you, the three are not interchangeable.

Nobody publishes the pier either. Ha Long offers a driver three plausible answers and he will pick one: Tuan Chau Marina and the Ha Long International Cruise Port are about twenty minutes apart in traffic, and Hon Gai Pier is over the Bai Chay bridge from both. Have the name typed into the confirmation and say it out loud yourself in the car.

The 9.5 with nothing under it

Google shows a 9.5 average. We collected no reviews at all, so this page holds a number and no evidence for it. We are not printing how many ratings sit behind that average either. Across the review ledgers on this site those counts do not reconcile with the reviews we were able to collect, and an average resting on a denominator we distrust is not a fact.

An empty record is not a bad verdict. A small boat the operator dates to 2022 plausibly sells most of its rooms through agents and domestic channels that generate no public English review. What it means for you is that no stranger has described the food or what happens when the weather shuts the bay. We do not hold a photograph of the outside of the ship. One image shows a deck bar at dusk with HERMES BAR lettered across it, which at least confirms we are looking at the right vessel.

Who it suits

Couples who want a small boat with a balcony and a hot tub on the main bay, hold a written quote against a named grade, and are content to judge a ship on hardware. Against the small boats and the best-value list, $320 for the room is mid-table.

Who should look elsewhere

Anyone for whom reading reviews is part of buying. Our luxury bracket holds ships with several hundred English reviews open on Google at this money. Spend it there.