Half Price in Ho Chi Minh City at the Caravelle Hotel

Toast the Caravelle's 50th anniversary with a special half-price promotion. Hurry-- you must book by the end of September for stays through December 31, 2009. You'll get 50 percent off plus a US$ 20 credit. Ho Chi Minh's historic hotel even has a book coming out this month, chronicling the stories surrounding the hotel that was designed to be Vietnam's grandest when it opened in 1959:

The Caravelle almost immediately became a focal point of world attention for the next turbulent decade-and-a-half. The hotel thus became inseparable from both the journalistic luminaries who covered the Vietnam War and a new, progressive brand of war correspondence. In the process, it also became a monument to the valor of the Vietnamese people. As Saigon's unofficial press club, the Caravelle was frequented by policy makers and such media icons as David Halberstam, Peter Arnett, Morley Safer, Neil Sheehan and Walter Cronkite. CBS News and ABC News had bureaus in the hotel, as did The New York Times during the early years of the war. And there was intrigue aplenty, as reporters watched from the rooftop bar as the city's outskirts were shelled, or Barry Goldwater harangued against the war's "negative" coverage by the foreign press.