In October, the An Dong Plaza in Ho Chi Minh City’s Chinatown, District 5, opened in time for the high season. The plaza’s shops will sell souvenirs, electronic goods, beauty products, fashion apparel and local handicrafts, and have restaurants, a conference hall that can seat 1,500 guests, and the 5-star Windsor Plaza Hotel from the eighth to 21^st floors.

Caravelle Hotel's Mr Stephen O'Grady

The Caravelle Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City has, for the third consecutive year, received the ‘Best Business Hotel Award’ from Business Traveler Magazine for 2004. The magazine also gave the award to the 5-star, 232-room Sofitel Metropole in Hanoi. The awards were determined from a survey of thousands of business travellers in the Asia-Pacific region.

Early 2005 will see the opening of the Park Hyatt Saigon Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, which is located across from the Municipal Opera House and overlooks Lam Son Square. The 5-star hotel will have 259 rooms, 21 of them suites, which will be decorated in French colonial style.

Airline schedules

SilkAir

13.5 million USD will be spent building the Dong Hoi Airport in Quang Binh Province. The airport, scheduled to open in late 2006, will be equipped with a 2-storey passenger terminal and a runway capable of accommodating medium-distance aircraft.

Garunda Indonesia announced in late October that its daily service between Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh City, with a stopover in Singapore, has been reduced to four times weekly.

In November 2004, Germany-based Lufthansa began flying to Ho Chi Minh City from Munich.

Singapore-based SilkAir will begin flying to Danang on 3^rd January three times weekly every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. The journey from Singapore to Danang will have one stopover in Siem Reap, while the return flight is non-stop

Russian-based Vladivostok Air began flying between Hanoi and Vladivostok once a week on Thursdays in late September 2004; twice weekly flights began in November 2004. The airline plans to eventually extend the flight to visit other cities in Vietnam, including Ho Chi Minh City, Danang and Nha Trang.

Three times weekly flights between Hanoi and Dalat are now available from Vietnam Airlines on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Passengers will be flying the Fokker 70, which offers a maximum of 79 economic class seats. This will be the first direct service between Hanoi and the Central Highlands. Vietnam Airlines has also announced that it may begin offering direct flight services between Vietnam and India as early as mid-2005. More detailed plans will be available in early 2005, but it is likely that the airline will be flying to either New Delhi or Bombay.

In late 2004, the Vietnam Aviation Service Company (VASCO) began offering direct flights between Vung Tau and Con Dao four times weekly on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.