Le Saigonnais Lounge at SGN: Ho Chi Minh City’s Airport

We landed here early in the morning after our six-hour flight from Tokyo Haneda on Japan Airlines. The flight, incidentally, was perfectly comfortable and the “western breakfast” the flight attendants served two hours before landing was nothing if not varied.

After landing we stood in line at the transfer counter with 30-40 others until it dawned on us that, since we have boarding passes, we might not need to stand in this line. Encouraged by others in line, we found the entrance and were ushered through as if we were VIPs by a uniformed employee who even let Kathy take her bottle of water along in her carryon.

We found our way to Le Saigonnais Lounge, a contract lounge (Sasco) that admits OneWorld Emeralds and business class passengers.

It’s a pleasant lounge, better than we’d expected, with a pleasing array of food.

Kathy made her way to the soup station and thoroughly enjoyed herself- in fact we both did.

There’s a three-hour time limit, but an employee told us the airline has extended it to four for us, so kudos to Cathay Pacific! 

Along with slurping and savoring, we’ve used the time to complete a Hong Kong health form, to complete and photograph our self-administered Covid tests (RAT), and to complete our customs declaration for Indonesia. These tasks have seemed never-ending and we’re hoping we’ve covered all of the bases.

Our flight to Hong Kong is delayed by a half hour (like every one of our other flights, come to think of it), but we don’t really care if our HKG layover totals 17 hours instead of 18 hours. Another transit hotel awaits, giving us more relaxation time before the final two outbound flights of this trip, hopefully landing us in Bali tomorrow night.