As part of the visit to Vietnam by Economy Minister Nir Barkat, it was agreed with his Vietnamese counterpart to open a direct flight line from Israel to Hanoi starting this October.

According to the reports, Vietjet will be the airline that will operate the direct flights from Tel Aviv to Hanoi. It is a Vietnamese low-cost company that owns a fleet of 82 aircraft, most of which are narrow-body aircraft that operate domestic flights in Vietnam or within Asia.

The company also owns a small fleet of wide-body planes that can operate long flights. This fleet includes seven Airbus A330-300 aircraft that are used, among other things, to operate the company’s flights to Australia and India.

Viajet’s A330 aircraft have 377 seats in 2 service classes: business (12 seats) and tourist (365 seats) – a relatively crowded configuration with a high number of seats in tourist class. This means that the company will probably have to also offer convenient connecting flights within Asia in order to successfully fill the planes and make the line profitable.

It is important to say that this is not the first time that the possibility of direct flights from Vietnam to Israel has come up, in fact the issue has been on the agenda for many years and similar statements have been heard by ministers in the various governments over the years. In practice, until now the Vietnamese airlines apparently believed less in the economic viability of operating direct flights to Israel and never actually opened routes, despite the various statements. This is despite the fact that during the Corona virus, the national airline of Vietnam operated several charter flights directly to Israel.

We will recall that as part of the Minister of Economy’s visit to Vietnam, it was also agreed that Israeli citizens will be able to receive an electronic visa to Vietnam, without the need to physically go to the embassy.