We will be visiting Vietnam for a couple of weeks in December. I'm looking at Visa options - the e-Visa makes sense if it will work with our itinerary.

We are USA citizens traveling on USA passports. Our arrival will be a flight from Luang Prabang to Hanoi. eVisa should be fine for the entry.

Question is about departure. Our last day we fly Hue - Ho Chi Minh City. Layover in transit for a few hours. Then fly Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh. When will we go through Vietnam immgration exit procedures? In Hue (not on the eVisa list)? or in Ho Chi Minh City (on the eVisa list)?

I'm hoping someone who had departed Vietnam after a connecting flight can give us some insight.

I don’t have a definitive answer but have used eVisa, VOA and "normal" visas many times.

Hue is a small, mainly domestic, airport that has few international flights so that is probably why it is not on the list of destinations. Most people, flying internationally from Central Vietnam would fly from DaNang’s much larger airport which is an hour or so away and is on the list. It is not shown on the VOA list of ports either so you only other alternative is a full visa which is both time consuming and expensive.

Regardless of what departure point you put on your eVisa, it wont show up on the visa itself, so you could put any departure point you want and it wouldn’t make any difference. In your case I would just put Saigon as that is your departure point from the country.

I think a lot depends on whether you have a through ticket to your final destination or two separate tickets. Either way, I would try my luck in Hue to go through immigration there but you run the risk of the airline not letting you on the through flight, in which case I would just check your bags through to Saigon and pick them up there and go through immigration there. If you have tickets on two separate airlines then you don’t have a problem apart from having to check and recheck your bags. You could check with Saigon airport to see whether they have an immigration desk in the transit area.

You could try asking the question on Tripadvisor where there is more activity but I doubt you will get a definitive answer even there as few will be doing what you are doing. You could ask the airline(s) but IME they are rarely of much help.

One other thought is to see how expensive it would be to change your ticket to fly from Da Nang.

IME the immigration people don’t care too much about people leaving the country. I have done something similar when crossing at land borders to Cambodia and Laos and not had a problem.

Good luck and do come back and let us know if you do get answers

crellston, Thanks for your reply. Our flights are on one ticket, but are defnitely two separate flights with several hours in between. The first flight is domestic, so I'm guessing we have to change from domestic to international part of SGN airport, and probably go through whatever exit immigration when we change from Domestic to International sections at SGN. If anyone has flown a domestic flight to Saigon airport, I would love to have them confirm that - or tell me how it works there.

Putting SGN down as our exit point makes sense to me. Fortunately we have several hours in SGN. If it means picking up luggage and checking it back in, we have plenty of time.

If anyone has flown a domestic flight to Saigon to get an international flight, I would love to know how the immigration stuff worked. Do you change terminals? Do you go through TSA and immigration in Saigon?