Traveling Vietnam During Tet (Lunar New Year)

Tet is the Lunar New Year and the most important date in the Vietnamese calendar, and the honest framing for a visitor is that it is not a festival laid on for the public. It is the entire country travelling home to be with family. Understanding that one fact explains everything else about what works and what does not.

When Tet falls, and why the dates move

Tet follows the lunar calendar, so it shifts every year, usually landing between late January and mid-February. In 2027 Tet day is 6 February, with the public-sector holiday announced as 4 to 10 February. Always confirm the dates for your own year before booking anything — they are set each year and widely misreported in travel articles written well in advance.

The official holiday is the smaller number. The practical disruption window is roughly a week either side, because people travel home before and back after. Vietnam Airlines, for instance, treats a span running into the third week of February as its return-surge period for routes from Ho Chi Minh City to the north.

What closes

Family-run businesses — which is most of the good food in Vietnam — close for several days, sometimes a week. Small restaurants, independent cafes, market stalls, tailors in Hoi An, local tour operators. Museums and official sites close on the main days. Hotels, international chains, larger restaurants and the bigger tour companies stay open, which is why a package trip feels the disruption far less than independent travel does.

What happens to transport and prices

Popular domestic flights and trains book out well ahead and fares on the busiest routes rise sharply. This is the part that catches people: it is not that travel is inconvenient during Tet, it is that on the days and routes everyone wants, the seat may simply not exist. Intercity buses fill too, and the roads around the major cities become congested in the days before.

Accommodation behaves differently by region. City hotels can actually be cheaper, because business travel stops and the cities empty. Coastal and resort areas go the other way as domestic holidaymakers arrive. Expect the reverse of the usual pattern.

Cash, and the one thing that always bites

Banks close, and ATMs in smaller towns can run empty and go unrefilled for days. Whatever you think you need in cash before the holiday starts, take more, and take it out in a city. It is a common and largely preventable way for a Tet trip to go wrong, and it costs nothing to prepare for.

What Tet is actually like, if you go

It is quiet, and that surprises people expecting a street carnival. The public spectacle happens in the days before — flower markets selling kumquat trees and peach blossom, families buying in bulk, a genuine buzz in the markets — and then on the day itself the streets empty as everyone goes indoors to eat with family. Hanoi's Old Quarter at Tet is the stillest you will ever see it.

There are real rewards. Temples and pagodas are full and alive. The cities are navigable in a way they never otherwise are. If you have any Vietnamese connection, or are invited into a home, it is the warmest possible time to be there. And the flower markets in the week before are a genuine sight.

If you are going anyway

Book flights and intercity transport the moment your dates are fixed, months out. Stock cash before the holiday begins. Base yourself somewhere with enough open infrastructure — a larger city or a resort area rather than a small town. Lower your expectations about eating: have a hotel with food, or accept that your favourite-looking place will be shuttered. And learn chuc mung nam moi, which will be received very warmly.

A little etiquette goes a long way

Red envelopes of lucky money, li xi, are given to children and sometimes to elders; small crisp notes in a red envelope are the form, and the amount matters less than the gesture. Avoid giving anything black or sharp as a gift. The first person to enter a home in the new year is traditionally significant, so do not let yourself be the uninvited first foot through a neighbour's door on the morning of Tet. None of this is expected of visitors, and a foreigner who gets it wrong is unlikely to cause real offence — but knowing it changes how the week reads.

What this decision is really attached to

Notice what Tet actually does to a trip. It does not simply make one week inconvenient. It pushes your transport bookings much earlier than you would otherwise make them, which means committing to a route before you have finished choosing it. It raises the cost of any plan that leans on a single mid-trip internal flight, because that is the link most likely to fail. It inverts the usual price relationship between cities and coast. And it rewards planning you would otherwise leave until you arrived.

In other words, a single date on the lunar calendar quietly reorders the sequence in which the other decisions have to be made. How that sequence works, and which choices are worth locking before which, is set out in Vietnam, End to End.