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Going Global · Relocation guides · Ho Chi Minh City edition

The city guide
your family needs

Written for families arriving on international assignment. Every school, neighbourhood, clinic and restaurant in it has been checked by a person — and nothing in it can be bought.

Coming to theApp Store: not yet released, tell me when it is live Coming toGoogle Play: not yet released, tell me when it is live

The apps are in preparation and not yet released. Both buttons lead to a one-email notify list.

Ho Chi Minh City · First edition Free to read Works offline Seven languages planned
You are relocating

Everything you need, before you land.

Choose a school. Choose a neighbourhood. Find a doctor, a gym, and somewhere to eat on your first Friday night — in your own language, without a search engine guessing at what you meant.

  • Free for families
  • Seven languages planned
  • Offline
Get the guide → Employers, schools & partners

A settled family stays.

Mobility teams, international schools and relocation partners use the guide to shorten the settling-in curve — and to reach families at the moment the assignment is offered, not the week they arrive.

  • White-label editions
  • Compliance-ready
  • Measured reach
See how it works →
New

Where it floods

Street-by-street flood maps for seven Ho Chi Minh City neighbourhoods, season by season, with the evidence for every street.

Explore the flood maps

The Thảo Điền flood map, with the streets reported flooding drawn on
01

Five things decide whether an assignment works.

A family can get four of them right and have the fifth sink the posting. The whole guide is built around them, in the order they actually happen.

  1. 1

    Prepare

    The groundwork before departure — the country, the paperwork, and the decisions far easier made early than late.

  2. 2

    Choose the right school

    For a family with children, the highest-consequence decision of the move, and the hardest to reverse mid-year.

  3. 3

    Choose the right neighbourhood

    Where daily life actually happens. A mismatch here is a leading preventable cause of an unhappy assignment.

  4. 4

    Create community

    Purpose and belonging in a new city — especially for the accompanying partner, who arrives without the structure of a job.

  5. 5

    Have a great time

    The experiences that are the reward of the posting, and the proof that the move was worth making.

02

It turns pages, like a book.

The guide is set page by page, the way an editor sets a magazine: two-page spreads on a tablet held sideways, one page at a time on a phone. Turn through pages from the first edition below.

  1. A Brief History of Vietnam, Spread 1 of 4
    A Brief History of Vietnam · Spread 1 of 4
  2. A Brief History of Vietnam, Spread 2 of 4
    A Brief History of Vietnam · Spread 2 of 4
  3. A Brief History of Vietnam, Spread 3 of 4
    A Brief History of Vietnam · Spread 3 of 4
  4. A Brief History of Vietnam, Spread 4 of 4
    A Brief History of Vietnam · Spread 4 of 4

Pages from the first edition as they are being laid out. Grey boxes mark video and photographs still to come.

Turn all the pages

03

Three sections, in the order the move happens.

Choose a section to see what it covers, the questions it answers and the listings behind it.

Preparations

The pre-arrival phase. Understanding the country before you commit to it, and getting the consequential decisions made while they are still cheap to change. For a family with children, that means the school: the highest-consequence decision of the move, and the hardest to reverse mid-year.

Carries Prepare · Choose the right school

The questions it answers

  • What should we understand about the country before we say yes?
  • Which paperwork has to start early, and in what order?
  • Which schools fit our children, and how do we compare them fairly?
  • Which decisions are cheap now and expensive after we land?

Listings behind it

  • Schools
  • Consulates

Everything inside the guide →Plan your first 30 days →

04

Three promises, and we hold all of them.

Not marketing positions. These are the rules the guide is built under, and the reason relocation partners and HR teams are willing to hand it to their people.

Advertising never touches the content

An advertiser cannot buy its way into the guide, up the order, or out of a fair description. Listings are ordered by an objective rule, and every venue clears the same verification bar whether it pays us or not.

A person checked it

Every listing is verified against the venue's own current source rather than an aggregator — and re-checked on a monthly cycle, because a guide that was right last year is not a guide.

We are not a relocation company

We do not move you, lease for you, or manage your assignment, and we never will. That limit is permanent — it is what lets us be genuinely useful to the companies who do.

05 · The app

Made for the phone in your pocket and the tablet on the flight.

The guide lives in an app for iPhone, iPad and Android. It is being prepared for release; leave your email and we will tell you the day it is available, and nothing else.

Coming to theApp Store: not yet released, tell me when it is live Coming toGoogle Play: not yet released, tell me when it is live
  • Turns like a bookSwipe or tap to turn. Spreads on a tablet, single pages on a phone.
  • Offline, city by cityDownload a city for the flight, the look-see trip, the lift.
  • An assistant that citesAnswers from the guide alone, says where from, and says when it does not know.
  • Report a wrong listingEvery listing has a Report control. Each report is checked at the source.
  • Your languageEnglish and Vietnamese first; French, German, Japanese, Korean and Chinese follow.
  • No passwordsSign in with your email and a one-time code.
06

Who it is for.

Families read it: in the Going Global app, or in a partner edition from the employer or relocation company sending them, which collects no personal data from them.

Families

Relocating on assignment

Free to read. Everything you need to choose a school, a neighbourhood and a doctor before you land.

Get the guide → Employers

Mobility & HR teams

Give every assignee the same neutral, verified guide on the day the assignment is offered.

For employers → Schools

International schools

Give admitted families and recruited teachers the whole city, not just the campus.

For schools → Relocation

Relocation companies

We don’t move anyone and never will. Your consultants get a guide worth handing over.

For relocation firms →
07

Ho Chi Minh City first.

Each city is built to the same template and the same standard. The order is set by where families are actually being sent.

Stylised map of Ho Chi Minh City A hand-drawn style line map, not to scale: the Saigon River winding north to south, with the approximate positions of the neighbourhoods the guide writes about: District 1, District 3, District 4, Binh Thanh, Thao Dien, An Phu and Thu Thiem, and Phu My Hung in the District 7 area. District 1 District 3 District 4 Binh Thanh Thao Dien An Phu & Thu Thiem Phu My Hung (District 7 area)
Stylised map Not to scale. Positions are approximate. The heavier line is the Saigon River; the names are the neighbourhoods the guide writes about.
First edition · in buildHo Chi Minh CitySee the edition → NextSingaporeIn preparation → In buildHong KongIn preparation → In buildBeijingIn preparation → In buildShanghaiIn preparation →

Explore the live Ho Chi Minh City map →

08

The guide we weren't allowed to make the first time.

In 2009 we built a relocation guide for a single international school. It was good, and it worked, and it was not objective — it existed to sell one school.

The relocation companies who handed it to arriving families gave us the same verdict, independently and repeatedly: it needed a genuinely objective education section to be worth anything to the people receiving it.

The market asked for objectivity. It was never a position we imposed on it.

Building the neutral, multi-school guide that first product was not allowed to be is the reason this company exists. Everything downstream — the verification discipline, the firewall between advertising and content, the refusal to enter the logistics business — follows from that one correction.

Read a chapter free.

“Five Pillars of Relocation Success”, a chapter from the Ho Chi Minh City First Edition, as a designed PDF. Leave your email address and the download link appears right here.

The chapter is yours either way; the newsletter is a separate choice. How we handle your address · Remove my address

Arriving somewhere new?

The guide is free to read and works offline. It is published in English and Vietnamese first, with French, German, Japanese, Korean and Chinese to follow.

Coming to theApp Store: not yet released, tell me when it is live Coming toGoogle Play: not yet released, tell me when it is live
Turn through the sample Plan your move, week by week Choose a curriculum