destination · Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City in 2026: 6.58 million international visitors in ten months, 9 million motorbikes, and a metro that finally works

Review of Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City is the most energetic city in Southeast Asia and the one that most reliably overwhelms people in the first hour. It took more than 6.58 million international visitors in the first ten months of 2025, 65.9 per cent of a 10 million target, with tourism revenue of 208.06 trillion Vietnamese dong against a 290 trillion dong goal, roughly 11 billion US dollars. It is a working commercial city that happens to be full of visitors, not a resort, and it behaves like one. The defining physical fact is the traffic. There are around 9 million registered motorbikes in the city, and they do not stop for pedestrians in the way a Western driver would. Crossing a road here is a learned skill: you step off the kerb at a steady, predictable pace and let the bikes flow around you, and the one thing that gets people hurt is stopping suddenly or retreating halfway. It takes about ten minutes to learn and it is the single most useful thing to learn on arrival. The city's biggest recent change is Metro Line 1, which opened on 22 December 2024 after years of delay, runs 19.7 km with 14 stations from Ben Thanh to Suoi Tien, and carried 20,558,990 passengers in 2025 at an average of 56,326 a day, peaking near 110,000 a day over Tet. TIME put it on its World's Greatest Places list for 2025. For a visitor it connects the central District 1 tourist core to the eastern side of the city in air conditioning, which was not previously an option. The scams are the mundane urban kind, run at volume. The main one is transport: unlicensed taxis that copy the livery and branding of reputable operators like Mai Linh and Vinasun, with meters rigged to climb fast. The area around Ben Thanh Market is the most active zone for this and for the associated overcharging, fake tour selling and currency-exchange tricks. The answer is boring and effective: use Grab, Be or Xanh SM, where the fare is fixed and shown before you accept, and do not take a parked cab that is waiting outside a tourist site. On the organised end, Vietnamese authorities logged dozens of complaints against tourism businesses in the first quarter of 2026, mostly over vacation package sales, contract violations and high-pressure selling, so treat unsolicited tour offers with the same suspicion as an unsolicited taxi. The environmental cost of being in the city is air. PM2.5 in Ho Chi Minh City routinely runs at around three times the World Health Organization's annual guideline value, driven by traffic and regional burning, and it is worse in the dry season from roughly December to April. It is not a reason to skip the city, but people with asthma should plan around it and everyone should expect the haze in the dry months. Against all of that, Vietnam is still one of the best value destinations on earth. The street food is exceptional and costs a few dollars, accommodation runs far below regional peers, coffee is a genuine local art form, and the war history, the Reunification Palace, the War Remnants Museum, the Cu Chi tunnels, is presented with a directness that is worth sitting with. Vietnam sits at the mildest tier of most Western travel advisories, and the realistic risks in Saigon are pickpockets, traffic and transport overcharging rather than anything worse.

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