Who Is Petr Brunclík and What's Behind Vietnam CK

With a tailor-made trip, one thing matters more than most people realise: who actually plans it. Behind Vietnam CK there's a specific person and a real team on the ground in Vietnam — and that shapes how the trips are built.

Behind the travel company Vietnam CK is Petr Brunclík, a Czech who has worked in Southeast Asia since 2004 and has lived in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) since 2012. He founded Vietnam CK — a licensed travel company with offices in Hanoi and Saigon — in 2015. The company plans private, tailor-made trips to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar.

Petr first came to Asia in 2004 as a backpacker; that trip ran from India all the way to Vietnam. It didn't stop there. In Cambodia he managed a resort hotel in Sihanoukville and spent years working as a guide — that is, from the position of someone responsible for how things actually run on the ground and whether people have a good time, not just someone describing the experience afterwards.

In 2012 he moved to Ho Chi Minh City, where he still lives today. He is based there, works with local partners continuously, and watches the country change up close: new roads and connections, shifts in the seasons, changing entry rules. He has more than twenty years in the region behind him.

Vietnam CK was founded in 2015, after Petr had worked in the region for years and come to know it from the inside. The intention was different from a catalogue tour operator from the start — not to sell ready-made mass tours, but to build private trips around the individual traveller, run by a company with a real base in Vietnam rather than one booking everything through middlemen from abroad. Today it is a licensed travel company with offices in Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh City (the Vietnamese entity CÔNG TY TNHH VIETNAM CK).

There's a lot you can read about Vietnam. Lists of the best places, photos of Ha Long Bay, advice repeated from one article to the next — all useful for a first impression. A single holiday then shows you one slice of the country with your own eyes. Planning a trip for someone else is a different thing again, especially when you've done it for the tenth and the hundredth time. Research alone won't tell you what actually works together: what fits with what, in which order, and what's better left out.

In practice it looks like this. Vietnam is more than a thousand kilometres long. Trying to see the northern mountains, Ha Long Bay, the central heritage towns and the Mekong Delta in the south — plus some beach time — in eight or nine days usually means spending much of the holiday in airports and cars. On a shorter trip it normally makes more sense to pick two regions and do them properly than to tick off five.

The same goes for getting around. Between distant points — say Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City — a two-hour domestic flight saves a day or two over the train. Elsewhere it's the reverse: the drive from Hue to Hoi An over the Hải Vân Pass takes a few hours, is part of the experience in itself, and a flight there would just mean pointless airport logistics. Order matters too: central Vietnam can be underwater in some months (roughly October–November) even when the north and south are fine, so the quality of a trip often comes down to the sequence of regions rather than hunting for one “best month”.

Then there's what a website won't show you. Two hotels with the same star rating are not the same thing: a resort far from central Hoi An means every dinner is a half-hour transfer each way; a hotel in the wrong spot can mean unnecessary driving every single day. These things can only really be judged by someone who sees them up close, again and again.

The process is simple from the outside. You describe what interests you, how much time you have, who you're travelling with and the style of trip you prefer. The team then puts together a proposed route with accommodation, transfers and activities, along with an indicative budget, and sends it by email. From there it's refined until it fits. Each trip is handled from start to finish by one specific person, and during your stay the office is on hand when something needs sorting out on the ground.

None of this rests on one person, though. Petr is the founder and stands behind the way Vietnam CK prepares its trips; the individual itineraries are then put together and handled by the local team and vetted partners the company has worked with for years, with a base in two Vietnamese cities. Vietnam CK today is a company with a real presence in Vietnam, not a one-man project. That's what lets it prepare more trips at once without any of them losing their individual preparation. You can read more about the company and the team on the About us page.

A good planner sometimes tells you what to leave out

A well-planned trip isn't one where someone nods along to every request. Sometimes the most valuable sentence is “I wouldn't put this in your itinerary, and here's why” — because it saves you days lost to transfers, or disappointment at a place that doesn't make sense at that time of year. With a fixed catalogue tour there's usually no way to change the route for your particular situation; with a tailor-made trip, that kind of advice is part of the planner's job.

Who this is for

This way of travelling isn't for everyone. If the lowest possible price is the deciding factor, it may not be the right choice. It makes sense for people for whom a trip to Vietnam is a bigger decision — couples, families with children, older travellers, and anyone who wants more than ticking off photos and values having their trip put together by someone with a real base in Vietnam.