Arriving at Tan Son Nhat Airport: What Changed in 2026

Most of what you will read about arriving in Saigon is wrong.

Not maliciously wrong. Wrong the way a map from 2019 is wrong. Guides get rewritten, date stamps get refreshed, and the directions underneath stay exactly where they were four years ago. One widely circulated page carrying an "updated May 2026" stamp still tells you to walk into a multi-story car park and ride the elevator to the third or fourth floor to meet your driver. That arrangement was abolished in July 2022.

So here is what is actually true right now, in August 2026, including one requirement that did not exist last year and that most guides still do not mention at all.

The arrival card is mandatory, it is free, and you cannot file it early

Since April 15, 2026, foreign travelers arriving at Tan Son Nhat must submit a Digital Arrival Card before they can clear immigration. The official portal is prearrival.immigration.gov.vn. It is free, and there is no payment step anywhere in it.

Here is the part that catches people out, and that we have not found written down anywhere else: you cannot file it in advance. The arrival date is not a calendar you can set to any date you like. It is three buttons — the day you are looking at the form, and the two days after it. That is the entire window. Try to be organized about this six weeks out and the site will simply not let you.

Set a reminder for three days before you fly.

Once you are in the form, five things are worth knowing before you start:

The arrival date is in Vietnam time. The field is labeled GMT+7. If you land at half past midnight, the date you want is the date it will be in Saigon when the wheels touch down, not the date you took off.
Have your visa in front of you. It asks for visa type, number, issue date, expiry and place of issue — and warns in bold that the visa number is what enables the service at the airport.
You can upload a photo of your passport and it fills the passport fields in for you. Faster, and it does not misread your own handwriting back at you.
One submission covers your whole party. There is an "Add Passenger" button. A family of four does this once, not four times.
Save the PAI number it gives you. That is your Pre-Arrival Information number. With it and your passport number you can look your declaration up and change it later, confirmed by a one-time code sent to the email you entered. Which is a good reason to enter an email you can actually reach from Vietnam.

And predictably: it is free, which means somebody is already selling it. Vietnam has a long-running problem with lookalike sites that take your details, submit them to the free government portal, and keep the difference — it happens constantly with e-visas, where travelers routinely overpay by fifty to two hundred dollars. Expect exactly the same play here. If a site is charging you for an arrival card, you are on the wrong site.

This is also the single best test for whether a Vietnam guide is worth your time. If a page is stamped 2026 and does not mention the Digital Arrival Card, it is recycled. Close it.

The rest of what you do before you fly

One thing this post assumes: you already have your visa. Most visitors need an e-visa, a few nationalities are exempt, and the application has its own crop of lookalike sites charging money for a free government service. That is a subject in its own right, and it is not this post.

Everything that makes arrival smooth happens before you leave home.

Install Grab and add your card. Registration needs an SMS code, so do it on a number that works where you live. You do not need a Vietnamese phone number or a Vietnamese bank account.
Sort your data before you land. An eSIM activated in advance is the cleanest option. Buying a SIM at the airport works, but airport counters run roughly two to three times city prices, and they are not reliably open late.
Save your e-visa offline. Screenshot it. Airport wifi exists but you do not want to depend on it while an officer waits.
Know your first night's address. You will be asked for it, and hunting through your email at the counter is how the line behind you gets long.

Which terminal you are actually in

All international flights arrive at Terminal 2. That has not changed.

Domestic has changed completely, and this is where guides written even a year ago will steer you wrong. Terminal 3 opened in April 2025 and took nearly all domestic flying. Vietnam Airlines, Pacific, Bamboo, Vietravel and the rest are at T3. Only Vietjet still operates from T1.

T1, T2 and T3 are not walkable. They sit three to four kilometers apart and there is a free shuttle between them running roughly 6am to 2am. Any guide that says "domestic is Terminal 1" is at least a year out of date.

Finding your Grab: the Lucky Cafe, the green sign, Area D

Grab cars are not allowed to stop at the international arrivals curb. That is the whole reason this confuses people.

From Terminal 2 arrivals:

Come out of the arrivals hall at ground level. Stay on the ground level — you are not going up anywhere.
Walk toward the Lucky Cafe.
At the pedestrian crossing you will see a large green Grab sign.
Cross the zebra crossing toward the car park.
Follow the ride-hailing sign to the left. The pickup is the sheltered Area D.

It is a short walk across a couple of traffic lanes into an open, ground-level lot. That is all it is.

A few practical notes. Your driver's assigned bay appears in the app, and drivers cannot wait long — go to the spot the app names rather than scanning the lot hopefully. There is a small airport pickup fee added to app rides; it is minor, and it is normal. And get in the car whose plate matches your booking. Not the one whose driver waves at you.

Expect somewhere in the region of 110,000 to 230,000 dong to District 1 — roughly four and a half to nine US dollars — whether by app or by metered taxi. Published figures vary wildly between sources, and the honest answer is that traffic and time of day move the number more than the choice of vehicle does.

Connecting onward? T1 and T3 are not the same place

If you are connecting to a domestic flight, check which terminal before you plan your timing.

At T3, ride-hailing pickup is on the ground floor of the PNA parking building — a walk of roughly 200 to 300 meters from arrivals, with a small fee for arriving passengers. Taxis queue closer, by numbered columns outside the terminal.

At T1, pickup is lane D1, and the app will give you a specific column between L5 and A5. Go to that exact column.

Note that "lane D1" gets used to describe pickup zones at more than one terminal, which is a genuine source of confused directions online. Trust the app's pin over any blog, including this one.

Fast Track: what you are actually buying

Fast Track is real, and it is not a scam. What you are buying is a person with airside access who meets you with a name sign and walks you into the crew and diplomat priority lane. Standard arrival service runs about twenty to forty-five dollars per person. Premium tiers cost far more and are a different product.

Now the honest part, which the people selling it will not tell you.

The queue-time statistics in the marketing are invented. One vendor page headed "Real Data" claims standard waits of fifty to a hundred and twenty minutes, cites no source or methodology whatsoever, and sells a forty-five dollar service on the same page. Meanwhile travelers posting in February 2026 reported twenty minutes at 2pm, about an hour on a Friday evening, and six to eight people per booth at 6:55am. One of them had paid for Fast Track and found nothing to skip.

But it is also not a rip-off, and the people who dismiss it are generalizing just as badly. Arriving from Hong Kong at 10pm, we hit a line of at least eight hundred people. The same thing happened the previous year coming in from Seoul.

Both of those things are true, and here is why: it is not random, it is your arrival time. Congestion concentrates in two bands — roughly 10am to 2pm, and 8pm to midnight. Early morning arrivals are frequently near-empty. Before you decide whether to buy, look at when you land.

Worth it if: you have a tight onward connection on a separate ticket, you have limited mobility, you are traveling alone with small children, you are still using visa on arrival rather than an e-visa, or you land inside one of those two bands.

Skip it if: you have an e-visa, no onward connection, no hard schedule, and you land early morning.

Think of it as insurance rather than as time. Twenty-five dollars to walk past eight hundred people at the end of a fourteen-hour flight is not a calculation you regret.

One caution on payment. If you book through a booking platform, you prepay by card and you have a refund trail. If you book direct, paying your named greeter may be normal. What is never normal is handing cash to somebody who approaches you unprompted inside the terminal. And check whether the listing you are buying is for arrival or departure — they are sold under the same name, and buying the wrong one is the most common complaint about the whole category.

Also worth knowing: the automated passport gates at Tan Son Nhat are still not open to foreign visitors on entry. There is no do-it-yourself shortcut.

Do your part

Half of what makes that line slow is people arriving at the counter unprepared. Before you join it:

Arrival card QR screenshotted, not sitting in an email you need signal to open
Passport already open to the photo page
E-visa printed or saved offline
Your first night's address written somewhere you can read it in three seconds
Everything else in your bag, not in your hands

You cannot control the queue. You can control not being the reason it stops moving.

The people who approach you

Anyone who approaches you inside the terminal offering a ride is not who you want. Legitimate drivers wait in official queues outside, and legitimate app drivers wait in the lot you are walking to.

The standard pitch is "cheap taxi, same price as Grab." It is not. Reported quotes from touts run several times a normal fare. The two reputable metered taxi companies are Vinasun, white with green and a red stripe, and Mai Linh, all green or white with green. Both require their drivers to wear a tie and display a photo ID on the dashboard.

Be aware that copycat companies paint their cars in near-identical colors with names misspelled by a single letter, and run meters that climb several times faster than they should. The safest move at the airport is simple: book in the app, walk to Area D, match the plate.

What is coming: Long Thanh

Saigon is getting a second airport, and the confusion has already started.

Long Thanh International opens December 1, 2026, about 40 kilometers east of the city. Its code is LTH — so if your booking says SGN, you are landing at Tan Son Nhat as usual.

For almost every visitor reading this, nothing changes yet. Long Thanh opens with a modest set of routes: four Vietnam Airlines services to Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Manila, plus Vietjet domestic flights. Everything else, including all long-haul, stays at Tan Son Nhat.

The date that matters for most travelers is March 2027, when long-haul international is scheduled to move. Even then, Tan Son Nhat keeps its domestic network and shorter international routes.

Two practical cautions for when that happens. Long Thanh is a 40-kilometer drive, currently expected to take somewhere between 45 minutes and well over an hour depending on traffic — the expressway serving it is still being widened. And ground transport arrangements there have not been published yet. Do not assume it will work like Tan Son Nhat.

Check your booking code. That is the whole trick.

How to tell if a Vietnam guide is out of date

Three tests, and they take about ten seconds each:

Does it mention the Digital Arrival Card? If not, it predates April 2026 regardless of its date stamp.
Does it send you upstairs in a car park for your Grab? That ended in July 2022.
Does it say domestic flights leave from Terminal 1? Terminal 3 opened in April 2025.

Apply those to this page too, whenever you are reading it. Everything here was verified in August 2026.

Once you are in the car, the next thing you need is the language. Our Getting Around cheat sheet covers telling a driver where you are going, in Saigon Vietnamese, recorded by a native speaker. And our travel links page has the apps and official sites worth having before you land.