Context
Travelling in Vietnam is not really difficult, but being autonomous about it is another thing. If you do not rent a motorcycle or car you’ll often travel by bus and train.
So how do you book your bus or train tickets? Often, you’ll delegate the task to your hotel’s receptionist that will be happy to help you get you where you want. This is really handy, especially by bus where they’ll handle the extra mile for you. But usually that means getting a hidden fee on your tickets. Not really a big deal for occasional trips but if you’re travelling a lot, it can become an important amount of money.
During a month trip in Vietnam, I finally found mobile applications that helped me being autonomous but sadly only at the end of the trip, that's too bad but I'm sharing those apps for future travellers.
Moving around in the city
When you want to move in a city and avoid walking, you have two options, using taxis or public buses.
Grab (Uber-like)
Grab is an app that serves many purpose but one of them is to help you get from one point to another either using cars or motorcycles.
This is the Uber but for Asia countries. The app is straightforward to use and works perfectly. And you don't have to worry about negociating price as it can be handled by the app directly.
Links:
BusMap
This one list public bus lines in three cities: Ha Noi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh / Saigon. I didn't use it myself because I was mostly walking, so I'm not sure of its quality. Also, I'm not sure you can buy your tickets directly but at least you should see the expected price of your trip.
Links:
Moving between two cities
There are two known websites to help you book your tickets yourself, 12go.asia and baolau.com. But as they are general traveling apps for Asia, they don't provides all possibles trips (at least for buses).
By bus using Vexere
During my second last trip on bus (booked by my hotel's receptionist of course), I saw a Vexere sticker in the bus. So I checked what it was and what a surprise when I found that was exactly what I looked for to book bus tickets. The app is clean (there are ads but not annoying) and worked great.
There is still on issue about pickup / dropoff locations that are not shown using maps so it can be hard to find the exact location of the bus stops.
If you're from Vexere, do something about your visibility on internet, couldn't find you in any way using travel keywords..
Links:
By Train using VNR app
If you travel by train, there is good chance that you'll find your tickets using previously cited websites. But still, if you want an app, there is one provided by the official train operator (Vietnam Railways / VNR). I just tried it in order to see to how it worked without buying a ticket as I already had mine and that seemed to do the job, but I that's all I can say.
Links: