Saigon airport expands international terminal with a place to snooze

Free lounge chairs for sleeping at the international terminal of Tan Son Nhat Airport. Photo by VnExpress
Lie back and relax in comfort, but make sure you don't miss your flight!

Tan Son Nhat Airport in Ho Chi Minh City opened its expanded international terminal with sleeping chairs and a children's play area on Wednesday.

The first phase of the expansion added a 100-square-meter sleeping room with 20 free lounge chairs and a play area of 40 square meters. Ten mini sleeping rooms with beds are also available for a fee.

The expansion started in June last year and cost more than VND1.5 trillion ($68 million). Another VND787 billion will be used in the next phase to extend the the terminal to the west next year.

The project, funded by the Airports Corporation of Vietnam and commercial loans, is expected to raise the terminal’s capacity from 10 million passengers a year to 13 million. The new terminal will be 23 percent larger than the old one, with 120 check-in counters instead of 80, and 19 boarding gates instead of 12.

Tan Son Nhat, Vietnam’s largest airport, received 24.3 million passengers in the first nine months this year, up more than 24 percent from the same period last year. International passengers increased 15.6 percent to nearly nine million.

The 850-hectare airport was originally designed to handle 20 million passengers a year.

The city is working with the ministries of transport, defense and natural resources to scale up the airport by 21 hectares using land currently controlled by the Defense Ministry to help it accommodate 50 million passengers per year by 2025.

by VnExpress