The sector is held by VietJetAir and Vietnam Airlines.
Airport pair · hand carry reference
SGN Ho Chi Minh City to CMB Colombo
Tan Son Nhat International, Vietnam, to Bandaranaike International, Sri Lanka. Computed from the scheduled network held on 2026-09-07.
- Nonstop
- 6 times a week
- Great circle
- 2,966 km
- Block, estimated
- 4h 17m
- Door to door
- 11h 02m
What SGN to CMB looks like
The SGN to CMB sector, the carriers on it and the flying time, before anything is promised to anybody.
Ho Chi Minh City SGN to Colombo CMB is a medium haul sector of 2,966 km by great circle, flown nonstop 6 times a week.
At the cruise speed this site models for 2,966 km, 830 km an hour, and thirty minutes of taxi at the two ends, the flight blocks at about 4h 17m.
Ho Chi Minh City SGN is a mid sized airport in the network held here, 77 scheduled destinations and 380.1 departures a day. Colombo CMB has 45 destinations and 93.2 departures a day.
Ho Chi Minh City carries about 4.1 times the departures of Colombo, so a courier who has to be rebooked has far more to work with at one end of this pair than at the other.
Colombo is 1.5 hours behind of Ho Chi Minh City all year.
The pair sits inside Asia Pacific, a corridor where the site already publishes 16 written lanes that go into customs and ground detail this page does not.
Who flies the sector, and how often
Average daily frequencies on SGN to CMB from the scheduled route statistics, both directions, with the operating carriers named.
| Direction | Flights a day | Flights a week | Operated by |
|---|---|---|---|
| SGN to CMB | 0.86 | 6 | VietJetAir, Vietnam Airlines |
| CMB to SGN | 0.71 | 5 | VietJetAir, Vietnam Airlines |
Two carriers hold the sector, VietJetAir and Vietnam Airlines, which gives a missed departure somewhere to go without leaving the nonstop.
Between them the two directions put about 11 departures a week on SGN to CMB, which is the number that decides whether a seat can be found today or on Thursday.
The clock from collection to signature
The same ground timings the route calculator starts from, applied to the 4h 17m block time on SGN to CMB. Change any of them in the tool further down and the total moves with them.
| Stage | Allowed | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|
| Collection and the run to SGN | 90 min | 1h 30m |
| At SGN before departure | 180 min | 4h 30m |
| SGN to CMB in the air, estimated | 257 min | 8h 47m |
| Formalities at CMB | 90 min | 10h 17m |
| Delivery run in Colombo | 45 min | 11h 02m |
| Door to door | 662 min | 11h 02m |
On the desk standard ground timings, ninety minutes to collect and reach the airport, three hours at the airport before departure, ninety minutes of arrival formalities and a forty five minute delivery run, the door to door figure for SGN to CMB is 11h 02m.
A courier who leaves Ho Chi Minh City at 09:00 local is on the ground in Colombo at about 11:47 local and at the door by 14:02 the same day.
Working backwards from a six in the evening handover in Colombo, the last useful departure from Ho Chi Minh City is around 12:58 local.
When the nonstop does not work
Every airport that joins the two ends, ranked by when they land, among the ones whose weaker leg is dependable enough to plan on. Connection time is allowed for the size of the hub. 24 of them join SGN to CMB.
| Connecting at | SGN to hub, flights a day | Hub to CMB, flights a day | Track, km | Estimated, gate to gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bangkok DMK | 3.29 | 0.86 | 3,125 | 6h 08m |
| Bangkok BKK | 12.57 | 3.43 | 3,108 | 6h 21m |
| Kuala Lumpur KUL | 11.29 | 6 | 3,517 | 6h 44m |
| Bangalore BLR | 0.71 | 2.71 | 3,868 | 6h 51m |
| Singapore SIN | 13 | 4.57 | 3,843 | 7h 10m |
| Kunming KMG | 1.14 | 0.57 | 4,792 | 8h 08m |
24 airports connect the two ends on the scheduled network held here. The quickest of the dependable ones is Bangkok DMK, where the weaker of the two legs still runs 6 times a week.
Through DMK the routing covers 3,125 km against the 2,966 km nonstop track and takes about 6h 08m in the air and on the ground at the hub, allowing 60 minutes to connect at an airport of that size.
That is only 1h 51m more than the nonstop, which is close enough that a connection is worth taking when the nonstop is full or badly timed.
Behind it, Bangkok BKK at 6h 21m and Kuala Lumpur KUL at 6h 44m hold the same connection, so a booking has three hubs to try before it has to wait for the nonstop.
If nothing suitable leaves Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh PNH is 213 km away by great circle and carries 25 scheduled destinations of its own, which is usually a shorter road transfer than a lost day.
Plan Ho Chi Minh City to Colombo yourself
The same tool the dispatchers use, open to anybody and free. It is loaded with this pair already. Change either end, add a stopover or a preferred airline, and it works out the connection, the transit and the door to door clock, with the real departures underneath. Put it on your own site if it is useful to you.
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Restrictions
Where this came from, and where to look next
- Carriers and frequencies: AeroDataBox scheduled route statistics, retrieved 2026-09-07. Average daily flights, not a timetable.
- Distances: great circle from published coordinates. They read short against a flown track, which is why the block time above applies a factor to them.
- Block and connection times: the same model the route calculator lower down this page runs, at the same rounding.
- Restrictions: the airport notes file, checked 2026-09-07.
- Industrial sites: public company information. Nothing here says or implies that any company named is a customer of any courier operator.
Who publishes this. OnBoard Courier is a placement desk in Dubai. An assignment is carried out by a vetted partner operator, with the desk as the single point of contact from the quote to the signature. This page exists because our own dispatchers need the answer for SGN to CMB in the twenty minutes before a promise is made, and a reference only one operator can read is not a reference. Free to read, quote and cite. Found an error? Tell us and we will correct it.
If you need something moved rather than looked up, the desk prices a hand carry in fifteen minutes.
- The SGN airport entry
- The CMB airport entry
- Hand carry into Vietnam
- Hand carry into Sri Lanka
- The written lane, Dubai to Ho Chi Minh City
- The written lane, Abu Dhabi to Colombo
- The written lane, Colombo to Sharjah
- The route calculator
More pairs through SGN and CMB: Singapore to Colombo, Colombo to Doha, Kuala Lumpur to Colombo, Frankfurt to Colombo, Colombo to Delhi, Colombo to Kuwait City, Colombo to Chennai, Bangkok to Colombo.