Skip to content Open tour or a ticket for each leg
The open-tour bus is the old backpacker route down the length of Vietnam. You buy a ticket for the full route, or for one leg at a time, and the company puts you on a bus on the day you choose. Each stop needs a booking a day or two ahead from an office along the route, and the bus leaves from the company’s own depot. The best known is The Sinh Tourist (formerly Sinh Cafe), with Hanh Cafe and other operators on the same trail.
A 2026 review of The Sinh Tourist priced legs at about $8 to $12 for a short day leg and $16 to $24 for an overnight leg, and said service has slipped over the past decade, with subcontracted buses and a flood of copycat names. The honest summary is that open tours are cheap and easy to book, and they give you little else. The same legs can be booked one by one on an app, and the review found those prices often match or beat bundled tickets.
Where the open ticket still helps is flexibility for a long trip with no fixed dates. If your dates are fixed, book each leg directly. In the south, a company that runs your route all day is usually the better choice.
Sleeper buses and limousine vans
Two kinds of bus matter on the routes from Saigon.
- Sleeper buses have reclining berths, often in two tiers. They are common on long routes (Da Lat, Nha Trang, and the north), and you can sleep, though tall travellers find the berths short.
- Limousine vans are nine to eleven seats with big reclining seats. They suit routes of two to five hours, such as Vung Tau, Ho Tram and Mui Ne.
The bigger brands, including FUTA (Phuong Trang) and Hanh Cafe, run their own depots and buses through the day. You can compare many operators on a booking app such as Vexere.
Fares and times from Saigon
Times below are door to door, because buses stop at a depot outside the centre and a shuttle or taxi fills the gap. Fares were listed on Vexere and operator sites on 3 October 2026.
| Route | Fare per seat | On the bus | Door to door |
|---|---|---|---|
| Saigon to Vung Tau (limousine) | 160,000 to 230,000 dong | about 2¾ hours | 3 to 4 hours |
| Saigon to Ho Tram (limousine) | 320,000 to 360,000 dong | about 2½ hours | 3 to 3½ hours |
| Saigon to Mui Ne | 160,000 to 550,000 dong | about 3¾ hours | 4½ to 6 hours |
| Saigon to Can Tho | 165,000 to 280,000 dong | about 3¾ hours | 4½ to 5½ hours |
| Saigon to Da Lat | 199,000 to 750,000 dong | about 7 hours | 8 to 9 hours |
| Mui Ne to Da Lat | 150,000 to 300,000 dong | about 4¾ hours | 5 to 5½ hours |
| Da Lat to Nha Trang | 180,000 to 550,000 dong | about 3½ hours | 4 to 5 hours |
The cheap end of each range is a seat on a plain bus, and the top is a private cabin. Traffic matters: Friday evenings and the days before holidays stretch every number. See the pages for Vung Tau, Ho Tram, Mui Ne and Phan Thiet, Can Tho and Da Lat for the road itself and a car’s drive time.
Safety and comfort
Long-distance buses are the most common way Vietnamese people travel, and most trips go without trouble. The record on double-decker sleeper buses is poor. The road authority counted 352 sleeper-bus accidents between 2019 and 2025, with 241 deaths, and in February 2026 it told operators to keep double-deckers off mountain roads classed V and VI and to use drivers with at least two years on buses of 29 seats or more. The rule is a good guide for you: take a daytime bus on the mountain roads, such as the Bao Loc pass to Da Lat, and keep the overnight sleeper for the flat coastal and delta routes.
A few habits help on any bus.
- Keep your passport, phone and valuables with you, not in the luggage bay.
- Take a layer. Air conditioning on buses is often set cold.
- Ask for the ticket to show the departure depot. Many routes have two or three, and the pick-up is not always where you expect.
- Check the fare on the ticket against the booking, since holiday fares rise.
- Book through the operator’s own office or website, because copycat names are common.
Bus or private car
A bus wins on price for one traveller with a backpack. A car wins once you add up the whole journey: it picks you up at your hotel and takes you to the next one, so there is no taxi to a depot, no wait for the bus to fill, and no hunt for the luggage bay at the other end. With three or four people the fare for the car often comes close to the cost of the seats, and you can stop where you like, whether for the tea farms at Bao Loc or the lighthouse at Ke Ga.
It matters for the long legs, too. Cars and buses in Vietnam vary, and so does the driving. The standard we hold our drivers to is calm driving with sparing use of the horn, a non-smoking car with no overpowering air freshener, a cabin filter that is actually changed, newer cars with smooth suspension, working seatbelts and child seats on request. A family of five or anyone with big luggage should take a 7-seater.
Our Saigon airport transfers show how a pickup and a fixed price work. For flights between cities, see the domestic flights guide, and for the train see trains in Vietnam. The getting around Vietnam page puts the choices side by side.