Saigon gets a second airport on 1 December. No flight from India is moving to it.

Ho Chi Minh City gets a second airport on 1 December. Long Thanh International opens about 40 km east of the city in Dong Nai province, and the plan is for it to absorb almost all of Saigon's international flying by late 2027.

Four routes move on day one. They go to Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Manila. Nothing from India. If you are holding a Saigon ticket for this winter, that is the answer, and it is worth having before a booking site or an agent tells you something vaguer.

What is actually opening

Long Thanh is the largest infrastructure project in Vietnam. The first phase is built for 25 million passengers and 1.2 million tonnes of cargo a year, on 1,810 hectares, with two 4,000-metre runways and a terminal of roughly 400,000 square metres. Phase one costs about 4.66 billion dollars. The airport code is LTH.

The Airports Corporation of Vietnam, which is building it and will run it, put the project at close to 80 per cent of contract value in early September. The breakdown is uneven. The first runway, taxiway and apron are around 99 per cent done and the fuel system is past 97 per cent. The passenger terminal, the part you would walk through, was a little over 77 per cent. The second runway sat at about 81 per cent.

ACV deputy general director Vu Pham Nguyen An noted that a foreign consultant had estimated the build would need at least 45 months and that ACV set itself 39. That is the tone of the whole project. Trial operations started in late September, with further rounds through October and November. The operator consortium, Incheon Airport and PMI Consulting, drew up about 55 test scenarios and treats 15 to 20 as the ones that must pass before a paying passenger walks in.

Four routes move. That is the whole of it.

Vietnam Airlines chairman Dang Ngoc Hoa has said the carrier will shift Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Manila to Long Thanh, which works out to roughly 12 per cent of its international flying out of the Ho Chi Minh City area. He described it as a market test before the airline adds frequencies or moves longer routes.

VietJet's plan, as reported by ch-aviation, is mostly domestic at first. Three A320-family aircraft based at Long Thanh from December to 15 January, about 18 flights a day, to Hanoi, Haiphong, Vinh and Thanh Hoa. From 16 January to 9 June it goes up to six aircraft and 26 to 42 daily flights, adding Da Nang, Hue and Phu Quoc. The airline has also asked authorities to cap new slots at Tan Son Nhat, which tells you how much it wants the new airport to fill up. Vietravel Airlines says it will start commercial services from the end of the year.

So on 1 December, Long Thanh is a large new building handling four Asian routes and a domestic shuttle. Tan Son Nhat keeps everything else, including every flight from India.

Where India sits in the roadmap

Here the published plans disagree with each other. The Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam's roadmap has three stages. From 1 December to 27 March, airlines move what they want to move. From 28 March to 29 October 2027, all long-haul international flights and international cargo transfer to Long Thanh. From 30 October 2027 to 25 March 2028, most of what remains follows, and Tan Son Nhat keeps only international routes under 1,000 km flown by Vietnamese carriers. CAAV said it built the stages around airline scheduling seasons so nobody has to rebuild a timetable mid-season.

Back in September 2025, a Long Thanh deputy director, Truong Trung Thanh, told Aviation Week the airport would handle Europe, India, the Middle East and North America first, with Northeast Asia following in 2027. He also said the plans were not set in stone, and a year on they clearly were not. India was named early and is not in the first batch.

One rule cuts through the confusion. Vietnamese authorities are not issuing new international permits at Tan Son Nhat. An airline that wants a route it does not already fly has to put it at Long Thanh. ACV is chasing 21 new international services by 2030, and the markets it has named include India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. It is also discounting aviation service fees by 20 to 50 per cent across 2026 and 2027 to get carriers to try the place, and it met representatives of 34 international airlines in late June.

Read that together and the shape is clear. Existing Delhi and Mumbai flights to Saigon stay put. The next one somebody launches lands 40 km out of town.

Forty kilometres out of town

Tan Son Nhat is inside the city. You land, and twenty minutes later you are in District 1 with a coffee. Long Thanh is not that.

The road links are decent: the Ho Chi Minh City to Long Thanh to Dau Giay expressway, the Ben Luc to Long Thanh expressway, National Highway 51 and Ring Roads 3 and 4. Local reporting puts the drive at roughly 50 to 70 minutes in normal traffic and 90 minutes or more in the rush. Public transport is not there yet. Around seven bus routes are planned, at 90 to 120 minutes, and a metro or rail link is talked about for something like 2030. For now it is a taxi or a booked car, and on a Saigon evening that is a number you cannot predict.

What this does to your trip

Three things follow, and none of them need you to change a booking this week.

• Check the airport code on your ticket, not the city name. SGN is Tan Son Nhat. LTH is Long Thanh. Booking sites that show you "Ho Chi Minh City" are hiding the difference that matters.
• If any part of your itinerary connects onward within Vietnam, check both airports appear on one ticket. A domestic VietJet flight out of Long Thanh and an international arrival at Tan Son Nhat is a 40 km taxi in the middle of your travel day, and a self-transfer means no protection if the first leg runs late.
• Budget for the transfer if you do end up at Long Thanh. A metered car across that distance is not a 200-rupee hop. Ask your hotel for a fixed price before you land rather than negotiating at the kerb at midnight.

The larger effect on Indian travellers is more capacity into Saigon over the next two years, and probably cheaper fares with it. The fee discounts and the permit rule exist to pull new routes in. VietJet has said it wants A330s on India, Australia and Europe from the summer 2027 season. That is the only India commitment attached to the new airport so far, and it is an intention with no schedule behind it.

What is still unclear

The 1 December date came from a CAAV proposal and is a target, not a filed schedule. This project has moved before. Earlier in the year the government was talking about the fourth quarter, and Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh spent a March site inspection pushing for it. A terminal at 77 per cent in early September has to pass three rounds of trials and be finished in about ten weeks. Airports open late. Nobody should be surprised if a first flight on 1 December is followed by a very thin schedule.

No airline has published an India to Long Thanh flight. Until one does, treat any agent or listing that puts your Saigon flight at the new airport as a mistake and check the carrier's own page.

And the 2027 stages are where it will actually bite. If your Saigon flight is still running in the 2027 summer or winter season, it is likely to move, and the question of whether an India route counts as long-haul under that roadmap has not been answered in public.

Nothing about this changes a Saigon trip booked for this winter. It changes every Saigon trip booked for 2027 onwards, and it changes the drive.

Everything above comes from ACV and CAAV statements, Vietnamese state media and airline schedule reporting from the past few months. Plans at this stage are intentions. The only page that is ever current is the airline's own, and it is worth opening in the week you fly.