The main airport in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City (a.k.a. Saigon), Tan Son Nhat International Airport, has been facing overcrowding for years. With almost 40 million passengers in 2024, it’s the busiest airport in the country. Even with a newly-opened domestic terminal, Tan Son Nhat’s international terminals are still chronically overcrowded, with resulting flight delays and bottlenecks.
However, the Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV) has a plan.
They’re hoping to move most, if not all of the international flights from Tan Son Nhat to the “still under construction but set to open later this year” Long Thanh International Airport.
Long Thanh, located in neighboring Dong Nai Province, is set to be a mega-airport. It’s currently scheduled to open on December 19, 2025. And ACV is looking at 2 potential options:
Consolidate
One option is to consolidate all international arrivals and departures at Long Thanh. It would have some domestic flights too, but the vast majority would be international ones. This would transform the new airport into a powerful international hub for Ho Chi Minh City and the wider southeastern region. It’s also similar to what Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Seoul-Incheon have successfully done.
Split operations
The other option would have the two airports split operations.
- Tan Son Nhat would manage domestic flights plus short-haul international routes under 1,000 kilometers.
- Long Thanh would then handle long-haul international flights and some domestic connections.
Admitted problems
Regardless of which direction ACV goes, there will be some downsides. Remember when Mexico City opened Felipe Ángeles International Airport in 2022 and it was a hot mess because of the lack of infrastructure? Yeah, same sort of thing. Long Thanh is located about 40km (about 25 miles) from central Ho Chi Minh City. When it opens, so will a new expressway. But dedicated public transportation (high-speed rail, etc) is still a decade away.
Feature image (cropped): Dennis Jarvis / flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0
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