Vietnam airport SIM: the passport rule

Viettel's 2026 tourist prices next to the airport mark up, why a SIM sold without your passport dies, and the 60 second check at the counter.

The SIM worked at the counter. The clerk at Tan Son Nhat took 350,000 dong, put it in your phone, and Google Maps loaded before you reached the taxi rank. A day later it is dead, the number is unknown, and the shop in District 1 tells you it was never registered to you. That story has 143 comments on r/VietNam from August 2026 and a near twin on TripAdvisor, and both were avoidable in about a minute.

Vietnam has made passport registration a legal condition of any mobile service for a foreigner, and in April 2026 it added a face check and a 60 day re check on every SIM registered to a passport. A seller who skips that step is selling you someone else's line. Here is how to spot it, what the official counters charge against the resellers, and where the counters actually are.

The 30 second answer

A plain Viettel SIM costs 60,000 dong on Viettel's own shop site, and its official tourist packages run from 60,000 to 180,000 dong on top. Airport resellers charge 250,000 to 500,000 dong for a bundle, most often 250,000 to 350,000. The price is not the risk; the registration is. If the seller did not photograph your passport and your face, the SIM is not on your name and the operator will cut it off, sometimes within hours. Use the check in the steps below before you leave the queue.

60,000 VNDa plain Viettel SIM on viettel.vn, 14 Sep 2026

150,000 VNDViettel 5G150T, 30 days, 5 GB a day

350,000 VNDtypical airport reseller bundle, 2026 reports

15 Apr 2026face check and 60 day re check took effect

Why a SIM that worked at the counter dies a day later

Decree 163 of December 2024, which implements the 2023 Telecommunications Law, requires a foreigner to register with a valid passport and lets an operator provide service only after the registration is complete, with a time stamped portrait photo on the record. Circular 08 of 2026, in force from 15 April 2026, added a facial biometric image to the four fields an operator must authenticate and ordered every SIM registered on a passport to be re authenticated within 60 days. A number that fails loses outgoing service first, then both directions, and the contract ends five days after the two way lock. The government's policy portal, in June 2026, confirmed that foreigners on passports must complete the full re verification or lose service.

That is the machinery behind the dead airport SIM. Since 10 September 2023 operators have been barred from issuing SIMs through dealers and agents, after the ministry said about 80% of new SIMs sold that way were unregistered "junk SIMs". Thanh Nien found shops in Ho Chi Minh City still selling them openly two days after the ban. A reseller kiosk that hands you a pre activated SIM is handing you one registered to a stranger, or to nobody. The operator's database catches it, and the lock ladder above does the rest. Reports of how long that takes run from 20 minutes to a week.

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The tell No passport photographed, no face photographed, no activation text arriving on the new number while you stand there. Any one of those and the SIM is not yours.

Tan Son Nhat: two counter zones and hours nobody can confirm

International flights use Terminal 2; the new Terminal 3 that opened in April 2025 is domestic, about 850 metres away, according to 2026 airport guides. SIM sellers sit in two places. Kiosks line the first floor walk before passport control, and the carrier desks are on the ground floor in the arrivals hall after customs, with the official ones reported at the far left of the exit walkway. A 2025 guide gives Viettel's booths as G.1.38/12 on the left and G.2.44/02 on the right after customs; Viettel's own page only says the international arrival hall after the final baggage claim and customs exit.

Hours are unsettled. Two 2026 guides say roughly 06:00 to 22:00 with unreliable staffing after 21:00, a visa agency says 24 hours, and a TripAdvisor thread says the kiosks outside pack up late in the day while those inside stay. No operator or airport page publishes hours. Landing after midnight, treat the counters as closed and have an eSIM already installed.

How to tell the official desk from a reseller, in Viettel's own words: red and white Viettel branding, bilingual price boards, and staff who ask for your passport. Viettel adds that unofficial sellers may provide pre activated SIMs that stop working within a few days.

Noi Bai: which desk is which in Terminal 2

Hanoi's international arrivals are in Terminal 2. Viettel's official article puts its counter in the arrival hall immediately after passport control. A June 2026 guide places the red Viettel desk first on the left after customs near the currency exchange, Vinaphone in blue further along the left, and MobiFone in blue on the right near the taxi desks; an older guide gives sections B8 and B9 for Viettel and Vinaphone. Reported hours are 08:00 to midnight in one guide and 06:00 to 02:00 in another, and a traveller arriving at 22:00 in October 2025 found them open. Same rule as Saigon: no operator hours exist, so plan for the worst.

Viettel's official 2026 tourist prices next to the airport mark up

Viettel publishes its tourist table, which makes the airport comparison easy. These are the packages listed on Viettel's tourist eSIM guide, read on 14 September 2026, with the note that the package price excludes the SIM card itself; users and one reseller put the card at about 50,000 dong.

Package	Validity	Data	Calls	Price, VND
5G60T	7 days	5 GB a day	None	60,000
5G60H	7 days	15 GB total	None	60,000
5G80T	15 days	5 GB a day	None	80,000
5G120H	30 days	1.5 GB a day	30 min within Viettel, 15 min to other networks	120,000
5G150T	30 days	5 GB a day	None	150,000
5G180H	30 days	5 GB a day	30 min within Viettel, 15 min to other networks	180,000

Against that, the airport. The TripAdvisor field report that started this post paid 350,000 dong for a three week "unlimited" Viettel SIM before immigration, saw 300,000 after the declaration area and 430,000 outside the terminal, about a year ago. Reddit posters in August 2026 paid 350,000 and 400,000, the second one asking for Viettel and getting MobiFone with no calls or texts. The same poster's parents paid 250,000 at a Viettel store in town. There is no unlimited package on Viettel's table; every official tourist plan is capped at 5 GB a day or less, and one Noi Bai reseller "unlimited" reportedly throttles to 128 kbps after a gigabyte.

The older plan names you will see in guides, TOUR200, TOUR300 and the SD120 series, are not on Viettel's 2026 table. If a counter quotes one, ask which of the 5G packages it is.

Vinaphone, MobiFone and Way2Go: what we could and could not verify

Vinaphone's tourist SIM is listed identically by three guides in 2026 at 199,000 dong for 15 days with 1 GB a day, 50 local and 50 international minutes and 50 texts, plus 10,000 to 20,000 for the card. Its official tourist page timed out on us twice, so those are reseller figures. MobiFone's Hi Vietnam app is said to sell a 25 GB three day eSIM for 80,000 dong and a 250 GB 30 day one for 240,000 with passport verification and the first day free; no official MobiFone page was readable. Way2Go is a MobiFone network tourist SIM sold from a counter at Tan Son Nhat through pickup vendors; its own pages were blocked to us. Treat all three as "as listed by resellers in mid 2026" until you see the operator's board.

Convenience stores no longer sell SIMs

Older guides, and some updated this year, still list Circle K, 7 Eleven, WinMart and FamilyMart as places to buy a SIM. The dealer ban of 10 September 2023 ended that; the seed field report from a year ago confirms Circle K and the convenience stores in central Ho Chi Minh City no longer sell SIMs. FPT Shop and The Gioi Di Dong were named by the ministry as compliant chains, alongside the operators' own shops. Whether convenience stores still sell top up scratch cards we could not confirm in 2026.

The 60 second counter check before you leave the queue

Hand over the physical passport. Viettel's eSIM guide says digital copies are not valid, and the counter should photograph it.
Let them photograph your face. Since 15 April 2026 the portrait is part of the record; a seller who skips it is not registering you.
Wait for the activation text on the new number before you move. Ask the clerk to open the balance in the My Viettel app, or send KTTK to 191 on a Viettel line; the old star codes are reported to no longer work.
Text TTTB to 1414, free on every carrier. The reply lists the name and document number the SIM is registered to. The official 2026 article describes the citizen ID version, and older sources say it works with a passport number too, so treat a reply in your name as the goal and an empty or foreign reply as the alarm.
Open Grab and try to sign in with the new number. Recycled airport numbers are reported to be refused by Grab, Zalo and Shopee because a previous owner already used them.
Keep the packaging with the number on it and pay in a way you can trace. Viettel counters take VNPay and VietQR, and some take Alipay Plus and WeChat Pay.

Your SIM stopped working: getting it re registered

Take the SIM, the packaging and your physical passport to a shop run by that carrier, not a kiosk. A Viettel store, a Vinaphone store or a MobiFone store will fill in the forms and move the number onto your name, which travellers report taking 15 to 30 minutes and which fixed a MobiFone airport SIM registered to a stranger back in 2023. Viettel's hotline, 1800 8098, is staffed around the clock. If the number has already been recovered by the operator, the credit is gone and a new SIM is the only route. The shop visit is also the cheapest way to buy in the first place: about 200,000 dong all in at a Viettel store, one Redditor found, against 350,000 at the airport, at the cost of up to an hour in the shop rather than ten minutes at the counter.

Recycled numbers and what to ask for instead

An October 2024 r/VietNam thread with 190 upvotes collected the recycled number stories: a Hanoi airport "Viettel" store that sold an old SIM carrying debt, numbers that stopped after 20 minutes, three hours and a week, and Da Nang airport numbers that could not receive calls or register on Zalo or Shopee. The fix in that thread is the fix everywhere: buy at an official carrier store or order on Viettel's tourist site, and install the My Viettel app to manage the plan. If the number matters for Grab or Zalo, ask the clerk to confirm it is new, and test both apps before you leave.

What changed in 2025 and 2026

2G was switched off for 2G only phones on 15 October 2024, and the last 2G connections end in September 2026, so a phone without 4G calling will not make voice calls on a Vietnamese SIM; check that before relying on a local number. The April 2026 circular added face checks and the 60 day re check, and from 15 June 2026 a device change can trigger an outgoing suspension within two hours until you re authenticate. A lawyer quoted by Lao Dong in April 2026 said the authentication duty attaches to the number, so a Vietnamese number you keep for a return trip will be suspended and recovered on the same schedule whether or not you are in the country. We found no IMEI registration or device whitelist scheme for tourists on any Viettel, ministry or government page; Vietnam registers the SIM, not the handset.

When an eSIM is easier, and what a data only eSIM does not give you

Our Vietnam eSIM starts at $1.29 for 1 GB over 1 day, with 1 GB over 7 days at $1.49 and 10 GB over 30 days at $9.63, and lists Viettel, Vinaphone and MobiFone as the networks the roaming profile can use, and asks for no passport, no face photo and no queue. You install it at home on Wi-Fi, switch on data roaming for that line when the plane stops, and walk past both counter zones with maps already loading. The unlimited plans come in two tiers, up to 1 GB or up to 3 GB per day at full speed and then up to 1 Mbps for the rest of that day, which is the honest version of the airport "unlimited".

What it does not give you is a Vietnamese number. It is data only, so the Grab and Zalo codes go to your home SIM, which stays in the phone with its data roaming off; our dual SIM guide shows the settings. Our post on calls and texts on a data only eSIM covers the rest. If you will need a local number for a long stay, a bank or a Vietnamese app that refuses foreign numbers, register a real Viettel line at a store with your passport and let the eSIM cover the first day. If not, the eSIM is the simpler answer, and the one that cannot be sold to you in someone else's name.

Quick answers

Is it better to get an eSIM or a local SIM in Vietnam?

A roaming eSIM installed before landing gives instant data with no passport, no queue and no risk of a stranger's SIM, but no Vietnamese number. A local Viettel, Vinaphone or MobiFone line is cheaper per gigabyte and gives a +84 number for Grab and Zalo, but must be registered on your physical passport, and since April 2026 your face, at an official counter or shop.

How much is a SIM card at Tan Son Nhat airport?

Reseller kiosks and counters charged 250,000 to 500,000 dong in 2025 and 2026 reports, most often 250,000 to 350,000 for a month. Viettel's own tourist packages run from 60,000 dong for 7 days to 180,000 for 30 days, plus about 50,000 for the card, and a plain SIM is 60,000 on Viettel's site. The mark up buys speed, not a better plan.

Do I need my passport to buy a SIM in Vietnam?

Yes, the physical one. Registration on a passport is a legal condition of service for a foreigner, and since 15 April 2026 the operator must also capture a facial image. Viettel says digital copies are not valid even for its tourist eSIM. Only a roaming eSIM skips registration, because it is not a Vietnamese line.

Why did my Vietnamese SIM stop working after a day?

Almost always because the seller activated a SIM registered to someone else, or to nobody, and the operator's checks caught it. The 2026 rules lock outgoing service first, then both directions, then recover the number. Take the SIM and your passport to that carrier's own shop; they can re register it on your name if the number has not been recovered yet.

Are the SIM counters at Noi Bai open 24 hours?

No operator confirms it. Guides report 08:00 to midnight or 06:00 to 02:00, and a traveller landing at 22:00 in October 2025 found the counters open. For an arrival after midnight, install an eSIM before the flight and buy the local SIM in town the next day if you want one.

How do I check whether a Vietnamese SIM is registered to me?

Text TTTB to 1414, which is free on every Vietnamese carrier; the reply shows the registered name and document number. The government's 2026 guidance describes the citizen ID version and older sources say a passport number works too. If the reply is empty or shows another name, go to the carrier's shop with your passport before the SIM is locked.

Can I still use my SIM if it is not registered?

Only until the operator catches it, and reports range from 20 minutes to a week. Under the 2026 rules an unauthenticated number loses outgoing calls, then all service, and is then recovered by the operator. The credit you paid a reseller is not refunded, so registration at the counter, in your name, is the whole game.