Families, eager to see their beloved’s return, blamed for overloading Vietnam’s busiest airport

As it is only a few days before Tet, or Vietnam’s Lunar New Year, which officially begins on February 8, a large number of overseas Vietnamese are flying home to celebrate the country’s biggest holiday with their family.

Some 15,000-17,000 people complete the immigration procedure to enter Ho Chi Minh City via Tan Son Nhat on a daily basis, a 15 percent increase against the norm.

The problem is many overseas Vietnamese will not be greeted at the airport by only one or two family members, but half a dozen.

“One person will have six or seven people waiting for them so it is inevitable that the airport is overcrowded,” an airport official was quoted by newswire VnExpress as saying.

The international terminal is capable of handling 10 million passengers a year, and the domestic one, 13 million. But Tan Son Nhat easily exceeded its design capacity in 2015, serving more than 26.5 million passengers.

The official, who wished not to be named, said that while there are no official statistics on the number of overseas Vietnamese returning home via Tan Son Nhat, those who come to welcome their family member home are to blame for the overcrowding witnessed last weekend.

“Those people are not only from Ho Chi Minh City, but also provinces in the Mekong Delta,” he told VnExpress.

“They arrive at the airport hours before the flights of their family members are due, and they fill the waiting space in front of the international arrivals terminal.”

This means that the waiting space is overcrowded, which does not affect other sections, such as check-in counters or baggage security, he underlined.

Those who come to wait for their family members do not want to queue, and all tend to jump the line whenever they can, according to the official.

“Some do not even know when the flights they are waiting for would arrive, and they simply ignore the announcements made via loudspeakers,” he said.

“They would not take a seat, but stand so that there was no space for passengers to walk out of the arrivals hall.”

Nguyen Huy Thanh, who traveled more than 150km from the southern province of Ben Tre to the airport to wait for his family members, said it is unacceptable to see “an international airport that is so crowded.”

“Why don’t they install more waiting chairs?” he was quoted as saying by VnExpress.

But the request for more chairs was deemed unacceptable by the airport official.

“The arrivals hall is designed for people to leave immediately upon getting off their planes, so it is unnecessary to have numerous chairs there,” he said, adding it is a common practice in all international airports.

“When one arriving passenger is awaited by a dozen others, no airport on earth can handle such a situation,” he said.

It is however impossible for the airport to ban people from waiting for their beloved, the official admitted.

“We can only hope that they will behave more appropriately,” he said.

“But we cannot do anything if the people keep coming en masse.”