How to Enter Vietnam during Lockdown
Note: This blog post was accurate as of August 2020, the situation is rapidly changing with entry requirements and visa laws, I hope this blog gives you some insight on my experience but please make sure you are up-to-date on all new policy changes.
My Canadian girlfriend and I have been in a long distance relationship for a while, and when Covid took over the world it completely ruined all of our plans. After we realised that the world wouldn't be changing for a long time we had to start thinking of a plan. Canada wasn't an option as she had lost her job there and I wouldn't be able to enter as a tourist for a very long time, and at the time of writing this the borders for Canada are still closed. She could get a visa for the UK, but getting a job there for either of us would be really difficult in the current situation. In the end we decided that Asia was our best option since getting a visa and a job there would be fairly easy. After some research about the best places to live in Asia for work-life balance, LGBTQ+ rights, cost of living, and income potential we narrowed it down to a few options, Vietnam, Thailand, and Taiwan. We sent out applications to every job that was hiring multiple teachers and thankfully got a lot of interest and a lot of interviews for all three countries. In the end we decided on Vietnam and accepted our respective job offers there! Unfortunately due to bad experiences with the company we worked for I can not recommend them, please make sure to look closely at the reviews on websites like Glassdoor before committing to a company. While they did hold up their end of getting us into the country, after that it was all downhill.
Getting into Vietnam during the pandemic was not going to be an easy task, fortunately the company we accepted the job with seemed to know what was going on in regards to entry requirements, and has a lot of contacts within the Vietnamese government. There were a few times during the process when all of a sudden policies within Vietnam would change and we had to completely change our plans, but here is the process summed up for you!
1. We both got a job offer with a company in Ho Chi Minh city, which is a huge ESL company with lots of government contacts. They have tons of teachers who work for them and they send ESL teachers into primary and secondary government schools to teach English, maths, and science. I have asked to teach English, but my girlfriend who is an engineering technician has asked to teach maths and science, which they seemed very keen on given her background! How often do you have a teacher with a background in engineering teaching maths and science? (Edit to add, they didn't care about any of this, we were both placed in lower secondary and I was teaching maths and science, and she was teaching English.)
2. The policies in Vietnam kept changing so there was a lot of back and forth on flights and visas which took a few months. In the end we both ended up getting a visa on arrival, which I will cover in more detail later in this post. Originally they asked us to book commercial flights into Vietnam, unfortunately these got cancelled very quickly as the borders are technically closed. The company stayed on top of these changes for the most part, and informed us of chartered flights that would be flying to Vietnam on a few different dates.
3. The first step for getting in to Vietnam is to get approved with the Peoples Committee of the city you want to work in, this is done via the company who is hiring you, so I don't have much information on this. From what I can tell, they inform the committee of their intent to hire you, and they have to show that you are an "expert" in your field.
4. The next thing we had to do was to book a chartered flight since all commercial flights were cancelled, the company organised this but we had to pay for it. Given that it was a chartered flight it was quite expensive and cost around $1000 USD, the route I took was London to Dubai then Dubai to Vietnam, both parts were with Emirates. My girlfriend flew with KLM from Calgary to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Dubai, and then caught the chartered flight with Emirates from Dubai to Vietnam with me.
5. We then booked the hotel (First Hotel, right by the airport) and prepaid for that via credit card, you can quarantine with a partner at this particular hotel, but some of them won't let you quarantine together unless you are married, IBIS for example is very strict with this. The hotel cost $1400 USD for the full two week quarantine, this includes three meals a day for two people and 4 covid tests over the two week period. The cost for a single person is a little lower as they have to provide half as much food and half as many covid tests, from what I have heard from other people the cost for a single person is around $1100.
6. Three days before flying we had to have a Covid test, it had to be a RT-PCR test and you have to have a signed document from the doctor who performed the test stating that it was negative along with the date the test was conducted. It is very important that the test is the right type otherwise you might get turned away at the border! It is also important that you don't have the test sooner than three days before you fly. In the UK you have to get this test done at a private medical centre as the one conducted by the NHS only sends you a text or email with your results and to enter Vietnam you need a printed document or at least a PDF download of the results on your phone.
7. The documents you are required to bring to get a 90 day business visa on arrival are; a sponsor letter from the company you will be working for, an application form stating your personal information, two passport photos, your passport (of course), and a negative Covid RT-PCR test. The fee for a business visa on arrival is $25 USD, which you will be required to pay at the airport in Vietnam. This is significantly cheaper than getting one before you fly from the embassy in London, which costs £120! I suggest pointing this out to your employer and requesting that they allow you to get your visa on arrival rather than in advance. Note that the cost will vary from country to country.
8. Now that all of that was complete it was time to fly to Vietnam! Both my girlfriend and I boarded with no issues from our respective countries, they asked for all of the above mentioned documents at Heathrow airport before I could board for Dubai. The flight from Heathrow to Dubai was fairly full given the current situation, however, I did get a full row to myself which was great for taking a nap as it was an overnight flight. When I arrived in Dubai I immediately went and found my girlfriend and we caught up for the first time in about 8 months! The only documents they checked for the flight from Dubai to Ho Chi Minh were our passports and the Covid test results. This flight was almost completely empty, there were only 13 people on the flight in total and all of us are going to be working for the same company.
9. When we landed in HCMC we had to hand over all of the documents to border control, pay the $25 fee, and wait for the visa. For around 13 people it only took around 15 minutes for all of us to get our visas. Everyone working at the airport was in full PPE including blue paper overalls.
10. The home stretch was very easy, we picked up our luggage and got put on a free bus to the hotel which was only about a 5 minute drive from the airport. Once we arrived at the hotel we had all of our suitcases sprayed down with disinfectant before we could enter. We then checked in, we had to fill out some personal information and let them know what we wanted for breakfast the next morning. The whole process was very quick and easy, we then headed up to our rooms.
We are now on day 3 of quarantine and so far it is going well. We have had to change rooms once because the room we were originally put in had an issue with the air-conditioning, which is not something you want to be dealing with in 30+ degree heat! We called down to the reception the morning after we arrived explaining the situation and they told us they would set up a new room for us, we had to wait around 2 hours for that to be done due to the strict measures they have in place, but it was all very organised and they kept us regularly updated on everything. The new room is great, the air-conditioning works really well, on top of this in the first room we had two single beds, in this room we have one double bed, so double bonus! We think they may have assumed that we were friends rather than a couple originally which is why they had placed us in a room with single beds, but we didn't mind that so much, it comes with the territory of moving to an Asian country where being LGBTQ+ is not as widely understood or accepted.
The food in the hotel is quite good, and we have a good selection of meals to choose from, for breakfast we have a choice of seven meals, there is a menu of 20 options for lunch and dinner. There is a good mixture of Asian and western food, and so far everything we have ordered has been delicious!
I know that many people have been struggling with being separated from their loved ones during lockdown, for us moving to Asia was a great way to overcome that, and while the move here has been very expensive, it was completely worth it for us to get to be together! If you are separated from your partner, parents, or children I strongly suggest checking out the Facebook page "Couples Separated by Travel Bans" as the name suggests, this group is for people who are looking for a way to connect with their loved ones, and there are a few solutions available on there.
I hope you found this post useful and if you have any further questions about the process of moving to Vietnam during lockdown feel free to leave a comment below or send me a message!