Mon Cheri Cruise

Eighteen cabins, and for most of your trip they will not be moving. That is the complaint that recurs on this boat more than any other, and it comes from guests writing in English, German, Spanish and Dutch who otherwise liked the trip. One puts the sailing at one to two hours a day. Another estimates a mile or two in total. A third describes the shape of the day precisely: a tender or the ship itself from Tuan Chau across to a pier on the north of Cat Ba, an hour of cruising, kayaking, then another hour to the overnight anchorage where twenty-odd other boats are doing the same thing at the same time.

The named stops are Trung Trang cave inland on Cat Ba, the village at Viet Hai, the national park, and the Tra Bau area, where sheltered water between small islands makes the kayaking manageable for beginners.

None of those people are complaining about the boat. They are complaining that the word cruise is doing work the itinerary does not.

What is published, and what is not

Eighteen cabins, agreed across sources. Two decks, on one source. The steel hull and the 2018 launch year each rest on the operator alone, and there is no refit history published anywhere we looked. A jacuzzi, a spa, a gym, included kayaking and a private balcony in every cabin are all verified across sources, which is a lot of hardware for a hull this size.

Nobody publishes the passenger capacity. Nobody publishes the length. On the pool the sources are simply silent, yet one of the guest photographs in our gallery shows a sundeck pool with seating round it. So it looks like there is one, and no source we checked will confirm it.

Cabin area is unusable as published. Three sources say 35 m² and three say 70, with two at 40 and two at 55. The top two are tied, and a tie settles nothing, so any single figure you see quoted has been chosen by a sort order. Beyond that we have no room detail at all: not a bed configuration, not a deck, not a count for any of the five grades on the rate sheet. On an eighteen-cabin boat the gap between the cheapest room and the best one is proportionally large, and here it is undocumented.

What a cabin costs

From the sheet we read on 6 August 2026, priced for two people on the one-night trip: the ocean suite with balcony at $600, the elegance suite at $660, the Mon Cheri suite at $890, and the president suite with balcony at $1,180. A triple version of the ocean suite takes three at $920, cheapest per head on the list.

The advertised per-person figure, swept on 7 August 2026, is $165, with $330 at the top of that same sweep. $330 is exactly twice $165, which is what a scraper produces when it doubles one number rather than finding two, so the range is really one figure. It is not corroborated. Half the cheapest cabin is $300, so the headline sits $30 above it. The sheet is labelled as the highest published rate found, which makes it a ceiling from one page on one day and not a tariff.

What guests actually paid is more useful than either. One gives their figure as USD 400, without saying which grade or how many nights, so it is a data point rather than a quote. Get the grade name, the number of meals and the total in writing before you pay a deposit. One guest paid for a 24-hour trip with three meals, had it cut to six hours by the authorities, says the time on board came to about three and a half, and was offered $20 back after an hour on the phone.

Where it costs you

The aggregate is 9.6. We collected and read 191 reviews, 110 of them in English, and nine of those are one or two stars. The eleven three-star reviews are where the useful reading is, because they come from people who liked the crew and still would not book again.

The recurring items there: rooms clean in some accounts and tired in others, including a balcony dirty enough that a guest’s socks came away black, and insects in the cabin. A buffet that runs out if you arrive late. Kayaking in company with about twenty other kayaks in a small area. A cookery class that amounts to rolling a pre-made filling into rice paper, over in two minutes. Squid fishing that in December is two bamboo rods propped on the rail. One guest fell ill overnight, tried reception three times without reaching anyone, and was then looked after properly at breakfast, which is the pattern across this file: good people, thin systems.

Two failures deserve more attention. A guest arriving with a group was assigned to a different boat from the others and only got it fixed because their agency intervened, which is a real risk on an operator running more than one hull. And a guest whose flight was cancelled by Typhoon Ragasa in September 2025 reports sending three emails and being refused a refund, a reschedule and any credit. Read the cancellation terms before you pay, and read the one-star reviews on Google yourself. There are complaints in there we cannot check, and twenty minutes of your own reading is worth more than our paraphrase.

What holds up is the crew. Guests name individual staff far more often than they mention the ship, a solo traveller writes about not being made to feel odd for being alone, and a halal request was handled without fuss. Whatever this operation gets wrong, it is not the people in front of you.

What the pictures do and do not show

Of the fourteen operator photographs we assessed, four have “Mon Cheri Cruises” printed across the image itself, and we do not use stamped pictures. That is why the exterior shots, the pool, the dining room and the kayaking in our gallery are guest photographs rather than the company’s. Hold that next to a line from a three-star review: the photos and videos look considerably better than the boat does. One person’s judgement, not ours.

Lot 34, and why it will cost you an hour

This is the specific thing to take away. Two separate guests report that the address given to them on booking was “Lot 34, Tuan Chau Marina”, which does not resolve as a point on Google Maps; one had a Grab driver with no idea where to go and had to ring the office to have a pin sent. Ask for the map pin at the time of booking, not on the morning.

The lounge you arrive at is shared with Peony, run by the same company. Guests describe it as crowded and hot, with no order to the payment queue and a thirty-minute wait for the return transfer, and it is part of why boat names get mixed up at check-in. Separately: Tuan Chau Marina and the Ha Long International Cruise Port are about twenty minutes apart and drivers reverse them. Hon Gai is different again, over the Bai Chay bridge.

Who it suits

Couples who want eighteen cabins rather than forty on the Lan Ha side, who are booking a night at anchor with a good crew, and who will pin down the pier and the boat name first. Among the small boats it is one of the better documented, and on the best-value list it sits at the upper end once you price the cabin rather than the headline.

Who should look elsewhere

Anyone who wants to be sailing. If seeing the bay from a moving deck is the point, a day boat covers more water for a fraction of $600, and the difference between the three bays will matter to you more than the difference between hulls. One guest reached exactly that conclusion and recommended a day trip instead.