This is a question that nobody really has the answer to and the airports themselves will always tell you some absurd answer like 3 hours before your flight. There are some funny jokes out there about how nervous fathers will tell their families that since their flight is at 4pm they need to be out of the door of the house and on their way to the airport by 7am.
Before moving to SE Asia I had a traveling job and was no stranger to airports and what came along with them. I was constantly traveling and developed a sort of system of getting to the airport with plenty of time depending on the airport that I was flying out of. Almost always I ended up with too much time and had to sit around for a while and there were only a handful of times that I ended up stressed out because of being very close to missing my flight. As a business traveler, I only missed a flight once and it didn't really matter because the company was paying for it anyway :P
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When you live like I do in Asia, you end up flying a lot not necessarily because it is necessary but because it is often cheaper than any other form of transportation. There is tremendous competition between budget airlines over here so why on earth would you take an overnight bus for $35 when you can take a 1.5 hour flight for $40 to the same place?
I recently went on a flight that I will give better details about in a later post, because it was quite the adventure in itself, but I was quite nervous about having any problems seeing as how I had not been on a flight at all in over 3 years. I had also only ever flown out of the Da Nang airport once in my entire life. I was very unfamiliar with the system and even though I got a lot of advice from friends, a lot of that information ended up being conflicting. Some people said that you need to get to the airport many hours before hand, and others said that 1 hour before was enough. Erring on the side of caution, I chose a spot in the middle and chose to go 2 hours before my flight.
I ended up sitting around in the airport for nearly an hour and a half because apparently, not very may people use the Da Nang International airport. You certainly wouldn't think this by looking around Da Nang, which seems very busy to me at the moment.
I don't know what the deal is with my phone. It's probably an issue with it being a very inexpensive phone and that is why the pictures are shite. The point is, this is what the line looked like for my airline at 2 hours before departure. There's virtually no one in it and we were to the front of the line and getting our tickets in less than 10 minutes.
Immigration was the same as there was virtually zero wait time
Security took a bit of time but no more than 10 minutes total.
So by the time I was near enough to my gate I had 90 minutes before my flight took off.
Here comes the bad part: you do NOT want to be trapped in the Da Nang airport terminal for 90 minutes. There is absolutely nothing to do there and there is a very small amount of food options especially when you consider that this is a major hub for Vietnam and over a million people live in this city.
There were a couple of noodle shops, a few coffee shops, and a single Burger King that was charging the most I have ever seen a Burger King charge anywhere in the world. I don't know what a BK breakfast meal costs in the west these days but is it really over $15 a person? There was no way I was going to pay that much for a BK breakfast, so i just decided to wait. I had already had some bananas for breakfast.
There is free Wi-Fi that doesn't have any silly sign in process, so that is good, but it was alarmingly slow and unreliable when you consider that the rest of the city's internet speeds are actually pretty damn good compared to other places I have been in the world.
So I would say to anyone out there that ever has the question about how much time should you allow yourself at the Da Nang airport that 2 hours for an international flight is more than enough time. Obviously this could change depending on what time of year it is and how many flights are departing at the same time but unlike other places I have been in the world, they actually seem to give a damn about how many flights are departing and open up an amount of lines in order to accommodate the traffic.
My flight was almost completely full so it wasn't a question of nobody flying that day. I just think that the Da Nang airport is run very efficiently.
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It certainly doesn't look that way from the exterior, but the Da Nang airport is actually one of the more modern ones that I have been in anywhere in the world. I suppose they didn't really feel as though having a pretty looking outside is all that important and you know what? I agree with them.