What It Actually Costs
A three-month trip to Vietnam on a mid-range budget runs about $3,780 to $4,320. That figure covers a room, regular meals, transport between towns and enough left over for the occasional splurge. It is not a shoestring number and it is not a comfort number. It sits in the middle.
Daily spending splits into two rough bands. Careful travel costs $25 to $40 a day. Move up to $50 to $90 a day and you get better hotels, restaurant meals instead of street stalls, rides booked through an app, and room in the budget for activities. Vietnam does not have to be an expensive trip. Across Southeast Asia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia sit in the same bracket: beaches, temples, night markets and street food for under $40 a day.
Getting There
Flights vary enormously depending on when you book. A direct route from Kolkata to Hanoi starts at around $151. Book thirteen days before departure, as one traveller did from Hyderabad in January, and the same trip cost about $324 per person. The routing went Hyderabad to Kolkata to Hanoi. January is Vietnamese new year, which is worth knowing before you assume a fare is unreasonable. It probably isn’t.
Once inside the country, cash is the practical concern. Carrying $30 to $70 a day in Vietnamese dong covers street food, small shops, local transport and entrance fees. That is roughly 800,000 to 1,800,000 dong. Leave the larger amounts somewhere secure and withdraw more when you need it rather than carrying the whole travel budget in a pocket.
Trains and Buses
The rail line runs the length of the coast. Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City costs about $40. A soft sleeper with air conditioning from Hanoi to Hue runs around $44. The same bed from Ho Chi Minh City to Nha Trang is about $30.
The night train from Hue to Hanoi takes fifteen hours and costs roughly $15 per ticket. You get rocked to sleep in a sleeper bunk and arrive refreshed. For a long north-south haul, that is a hard price to beat.
Not every leg makes sense by rail. One traveller flew from Cat Ba, near Hai Phong, to Da Nang for Hoi An and paid about $81 for two people. Sleeper buses on that route cost more and take longer than overnight, which is the opposite of what most people assume.
Where the Money Goes
Two itineraries of identical length can differ by 25 to 35 percent. A fourteen-day trip weighted toward Hue, Sapa, the Mekong towns and Hanoi outside the Old Quarter comes in well under the same fourteen days spent around Phu Quoc, central Hoi An and the Old Quarter. Same number of days. Very different total.
Hoi An deserves the time regardless of what it does to the budget. One traveller’s verdict was blunt: the trip is not complete without it, and staying as long as you like will not be enough. It is also where custom-made silk dresses get made. After asking around, one person settled on $34 per dress and left the country with fourteen of them.
A Working Number
A seven-day trip and a five-day trip both have published breakdowns, but the daily figures are more useful than any fixed itinerary total. At $25 to $40 a day, a week costs $175 to $280 before flights. At $50 to $90 a day, the same week costs $350 to $630. Three months at the mid-range sits at $3,780 to $4,320.
One traveller set an original budget of $600 to $650 for a Vietnam trip. That number only works for a short stay at the careful end, or a longer one where most nights are spent in the cheapest beds available and most meals come off a street cart.
The arithmetic is not complicated. Flights in, a daily rate that depends on how you want to sleep and eat, train tickets between $15 and $44, and a cash float of $30 to $70 a day. Everything else is a choice about which towns you point yourself at.
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