Hanoi Free Private Tour Guide is a volunteer tour guide club founded in Hanoi on 9 December 2015 by Le Van Tai and Doan Thi Quy. Its members are Vietnamese students and young professionals who show international travellers around their city at no charge, in return for the chance to use their English and talk about the place they come from.
More than a decade on the streets of Hanoi
Before there was a club
The club did not start with a business plan. It started with an uncomfortable afternoon.
In the early 2000s, Le Van Tai was a fourth-year engineering student at Hanoi University of Science and Technology. He sat through a recruitment seminar held by an international company and understood almost none of it. The presentation was in English. The questions from other students were in English. The written test and the interview would be in English too. He left that room genuinely afraid of his own future.
What followed was six months of six to ten hours of English a day. It worked. Before he graduated, he was hired by one of those companies. For a while, he thought the problem was solved.
Then a Japanese colleague asked him to show her around Hanoi.
He said yes immediately, then sat down to plan the day and realised he had nothing. He had never visited a museum in his own city. He had never read about its history. He had no idea where to take her or what to say once they arrived. They ended up at a café, talking about the same everyday topics they always talked about at the office.
A second experience, on a business trip to the United States, was harder. Over lunch with American colleagues, the work topics ran out and he went quiet, not because he lacked vocabulary, but because he had nothing to say about his own country’s history, and knew too little about theirs to ask a good question.
The conclusion he drew became the foundation of everything that followed: language is only the container. Knowledge is what goes inside it. You can be fluent and still have nothing to say.
9 December 2015
If the problem was that young Vietnamese people learned English without ever using it, and knew their own country without ever explaining it, then the answer had to solve both at once.
The idea was simple. Put a Vietnamese student and an international traveller on the same street in Hanoi for an afternoon. The traveller wants a local who can explain what they are looking at. The student wants hours of real English and a reason to finally learn the history of the Old Quarter properly. Neither one needs to pay the other.
On , Le Van Tai and Doan Thi Quy formally established Hanoi Free Private Tour Guide as the volunteer community attached to EFIS English, the training programme where members build the language and background knowledge they need before they lead anyone anywhere. EFIS provides the training method, registered with Vietnam’s National Office of Intellectual Property, while the club provides the street.
This is the question we are asked most, so it is worth answering plainly.
Our guides are not paid, and they do not want to be. A guide spends four to eight hours speaking English continuously, answering unpredictable questions from someone who grew up in a completely different country. That is the most valuable practice they could possibly get, and it cannot be bought in a classroom. The traveller gets a local companion. The guide gets the afternoon they need. Nobody is subsidising anybody.
You cover your own entrance tickets, food and transport, and your guide’s if you visit somewhere that charges admission. That is the whole arrangement. There is no commission, no shop stops, and no upsell at the end.
The founders
Founder & CEO
An engineering graduate of Hanoi University of Science and Technology with a Master’s in Business Administration from Foreign Trade University, Tai spent years interviewing and working at multinational companies including ABB, Canon and Viettel before turning to education. He is the author of the club’s training approach and the person who first argued that English, culture and confidence have to be taught together rather than separately. He still teaches.
Co-founder & Director of Sales and Marketing
Quy has run the operational side of the club since the beginning. She oversees day-to-day club operations and leads the matching of members with the travellers who request them, the work that decides whether a guide and a guest actually have a good day together. Every booking that arrives through this website passes through the system she built.
“I could speak English fluently and still had nothing to say about my own country. That is the gap we built this club to close.”
Le Van Tai, Founder & CEO
2015 → today
On 9 December, Hanoi Free Private Tour Guide is formally established in Hanoi.
The first members take their first international travellers around the Old Quarter. Word spreads between guests faster than anyone expects.
Guest reviews earn the club its first TripAdvisor award. It is the first outside confirmation that the model works for visitors, not only for members.
Working relationships begin with Hanoi’s cultural institutions, starting with the Ho Chi Minh Museum. Guides move from explaining streets to explaining exhibitions, which raises the standard of preparation across the club.
Borders close. With almost no international visitors, tour activity stops entirely. The club keeps training, studying and preparing, with no idea when anyone will come back.
The first tours resume as travellers return to Vietnam. Many guides are leading their first ever tour, having joined during a period when tours did not exist.
The itinerary range grows well beyond the Old Quarter: museums, war sites, the French Quarter, craft villages, street food walks, early morning and evening tours. Traveller recognition on TripAdvisor continues.
The club marks its tenth anniversary with members, alumni and partners.
Today
More than 100,000 tours completed, and travellers from over 80 nations hosted since 2016.
What the club has built
They have left over 5,200 five-star reviews on TripAdvisor, where the club has remained among the city’s most-recommended activities. Read what our guests say.
The club works alongside institutions across the city, including the Ho Chi Minh Museum, the Hanoi Old Quarter Management Board and the Vietnamese Women’s Museum. See our partners.
Students, graduates and young professionals — for many of them this is where English stopped being a school subject. Covered by VTV, VTC, HNTV, ANTV and QPTV. See media coverage.
From the other side
“I feel truly lucky to have joined Hanoi Free Tour Guide. I got to learn more about history and discover things I didn’t know before. Since joining the club, I’ve become more outgoing and talkative, and I’ve made a lot of new friends. Best of all, my speaking skills have noticeably improved—I’m more confident and fluent. All in all, Hanoi Free Tour Guide is super awesome, and definitely worth experiencing and learning from (even though there’s a ton of information to take in and it can be pretty exhausting sometimes!)”
Phan Hà Anh · member since 2025
“The experience, as well as the live classes, were truly worthwhile because I learned so many new things about Vietnam’s history and its long-standing culture. Through the program’s approach to learning and exploring knowledge, I’ve picked up many useful tips that make it easier to study other subjects and topics. Ultimately, for me, being able to absorb so much new knowledge is the absolute best thing I’ve gained from EFIS.”
Smile · member since 2025
“The course was incredibly beneficial, helping me gain a deeper understanding of our country’s history and culture. I also learned a lot of new vocabulary related to history and culture that I previously never had the time or opportunity to explore. After completing it, I feel much more confident sharing the wonderful things about Vietnam with international friends in English.”
Anhngo Pharm · member since 2026
Conscience and quality
Two words have been on the wall since 2015. Conscience means a guide prepares properly before meeting you, tells you honestly when they do not know something, and never treats your day as an opportunity to sell you anything. Quality means the experience has to be worth your time whether or not you paid for it. Free is not an excuse.
A place to learn by doing, where every tour is a real test of language, knowledge and nerve.
A first friend in Hanoi, offering the ordinary, honest view of the city that no guidebook contains.
A way to share this country with the world one conversation at a time, rather than one campaign at a time.
The ambition has not changed shape, only scale. We want to keep training guides who are worth listening to, keep widening the range of what our members can explain, and keep the tours free, because the moment money changes hands, the exchange that makes this work stops being an exchange.
If you are visiting Hanoi, come and meet one of us. If you are a young Vietnamese person who wants to be able to explain your own country to the world, there is room for you too.
The club was founded in Hanoi on 9 December 2015 and led its first tours in 2016.
Mr Le Van Tai, Founder and CEO, and Ms Doan Thi Quy, Co-founder and Director of Sales and Marketing.
Yes. Guides are volunteers who join to practise English and share their city. You pay your own entrance fees, food and transport, and your guide’s if a site charges admission. There is no service fee, commission or shop stop.
Mostly Vietnamese students and young professionals who have completed the club’s training in English, Hanoi history and culture, and guiding skills before leading their first tour.
A paid guide is doing a job. Ours is spending their afternoon with you because the conversation itself is what they came for. Tours are private and shaped around what you actually want to see, not a fixed route.