Sydney to Ho Chi Minh City Flights | Get the Visa Before You Pack

The thing that stops you boarding

Before the fares, before the hubs, before anything: Australians generally need a visa for Vietnam, arranged before departure.

The e-visa applied for online is the usual route. Vietnam does not wave Australians through on arrival the way Bali, Thailand and Malaysia do.

This catches people out constantly, and the reason is obvious once you say it: so much of South East Asia is frictionless for us that travellers reasonably assume the whole region is. It is not, and the airline checks at Sydney check-in, because they carry the liability for flying you somewhere you cannot enter.

There is no negotiating it at the counter. You do not board.

So: apply well in advance, make sure the details on the application match your passport exactly because they are checked against each other, and confirm the current rules on an official source rather than a blog. If your household holds passports from more than one country, check every one, because the requirements differ.

That is the most valuable paragraph on this page and it has nothing to do with flying. Ask us to check your Vietnam paperwork.

The open jaw is the whole trick

Now the thing that makes a Vietnam trip good rather than merely fine.

Vietnam is long and thin, and it has international airports at both ends: Ho Chi Minh City in the south, Hanoi in the north, roughly seventeen hundred kilometres apart.

So the correct Vietnam itinerary is not a return. It is an open jaw: fly into one end, travel up or down the country, and fly home from the other. You never backtrack, and the whole trip is one continuous line rather than a loop with a wasted day in it.

Almost nobody books it this way, because a flight search asks where you are going and where you are coming back to, and "different places" is not what the box wants. It is a five-minute job for a consultant. Our Vietnam Airlines page explains why this carrier in particular is built for it.

And the open jaw is not just logistics. The two ends are genuinely different countries: our Ho Chi Minh City guide describes a fast, hot, commercial metropolis that is not nostalgic about anything, and our Hanoi guide describes a thousand-year-old city with medieval trade streets and a real winter. Seeing one is seeing half of Vietnam.

The four patterns

Vietnam Airlines non-stop is the incumbent, at around nine hours. It is a proper full-service carrier with a modern fleet and a genuine flat bed up the front, and it surprises Australians who expect otherwise. The honest drawback is SkyTeam: if your points live with Qantas, they do nothing here.

Qantas non-stop has operated in recent years and keeps your status credits at home.

Singapore Airlines via Changi is the long way to a close place and the best product. It makes sense when the fare undercuts the non-stop.

Malaysia Airlines via KL is frequently the sharpest fare when allocations are open, and it is Oneworld, so your Qantas status works, which almost no Australian knows.

Be clear-eyed: adding a hub to a nine-hour flight to save money is a real trade, and on a route this length the non-stop is usually worth paying a little for.

The Mekong Delta trap

The most-sold and least-good thing in southern Vietnam, and worth naming here because people book it as part of the trip.

The standard Delta day trip is three hours in a bus each way, a boat with a hundred people on it, a coconut-candy workshop, a bee farm, a man playing a guitar, and back. It is not offensive. It is just not anything, and it costs a full day.

The Delta itself is wonderful: water instead of roads, floating markets that start before dawn and finish by eight, houses on stilts, a pace that belongs to a river. But it is wonderful over two days with a night in it, because you are there at five in the morning when the market happens, which is the exact hour a day trip cannot deliver.

So the recommendation is binary. Two days and a night, or skip it entirely. The middle option, which is the one every booking desk will sell you, is the one to refuse.

The war, and what an Australian should expect

Worth flagging, because it makes this city different for us specifically.

Australia fought in Vietnam. Almost sixty thousand Australians served, and a great many Australians alive today have a direct family connection to it. Then you arrive and the war is presented, entirely reasonably, from the winning side's perspective, in a country that regards it as a war of independence and has moved on far more completely than we have.

The War Remnants Museum is confronting and one-sided and genuinely important. The Cu Chi tunnels are worth the day. The Reunification Palace is the quiet one.

None of it is a cheerful morning, and it is one of the more valuable things an Australian can do in South East Asia. Do not schedule anything demanding for the rest of that day.

When to go

December to March is the dry season in the south and the pleasant one.

May to October is the wet season, which in practice means a serious downpour in the afternoon most days and sunshine either side of it. Entirely liveable if you plan the middle of the day indoors, and the fares are considerably better.

The south is warm all year and never cold, which is the opposite of Hanoi and one more reason the two ends need different packing.

Tet, the Lunar New Year, is the peak that matters. The diaspora flies home, fares rise, and a great deal of the country closes for several days while families gather. It is fascinating to witness and frustrating to sightsee through. Know which one you are signing up for, and book four to six months out if you are going anyway. Our flights to Vietnam page covers the corridor.

Booking tips for this route

• Get the e-visa first. Before the flights, before the hotels. This is the whole first section.
• Ask for the open jaw. In at Saigon, home from Hanoi, and you never backtrack.
• Check every passport in the household. The requirements differ and the airline checks at the counter.
• Two days in the Delta or none. Refuse the day trip.
• The wet season is underrated. Afternoon downpours, not grey days, and much better fares.
• Know your Tet dates. They move with the lunar calendar.

Fares move daily and price individually: request your free Sydney to Ho Chi Minh City quote and a consultant replies within 2 business hours with the non-stop and the alternatives priced honestly, in Australian dollars, the open-jaw version alongside the return, and your visa requirement checked before you pay for anything.