Is Vietnam completely dead?

[goji]

READING the reviews is essential anywhere outside the branded chains, not just Vietnam.

By reading the reviews it's possible to detect such things as:
A high average review score, polarised with highly improbable 5 star scores against every item and real customers giving it a score of 2 out of 5.
Hotels that rent rooms out by the hour, which may cause unreasonable noise at silly hours.
Somewhere that attracts younger customers partying all night.

Also, be aware that review scores may be inflated. On Booking.com, considering the way they frame the questions and do the score calculation, a score of 6.5 is fairly poor and you should probably avoid it. I look for 7.0 and up.
Any hotel that manages to score below 5 is probably one step removed from a pig farm.

[frequent]

READING the reviews is essential anywhere outside the branded chains, not just Vietnam.

Hotel reviews on TripAdvisor are entertaining. I always pick the "Terrible" category first. It's often full of posters complaining that the hotel is somehow responsible for the outcome of an act of idiocy on their part, such as "I left my handbag on the dining room table when I went to the lavatory and when I came back 10 minutes later it had gone, together with the 500 dollars inside. Why didn't the hotel staff do a better job of keeping an eye on it?"