Arriving Siem Reap Airport

Siem Reap is the gateway airport for Angkor Wat. The old airport where we landed was about 6 km from the city centre, a small, neat airport designed in the traditional Cambodian style with no jetways- you walk down the aircraft to the small arrival hall. It was a quaint airport, and for some reason which we still can’t fathom, tourist traffic in December 2022 was so low that the airport and city were practically empty. You can imagine what was the crowd in Angkor Wat, but more on that later.

Update Dec 2023: Since we visited in December 2022, this airport, opened in 1932 and which was coded VDSR or REP, has closed in 2023 and air operations have moved to the new one made by the Chinese, some distance away.

The new airport, coded VDSA, is 40 km east of Angkor and 50 km from Siem Reap, considerably increasing travel cost and time for tourists, but presumably they needed greater space to handle the traffic (projected at 7 million a year), and to avoid damage to Angkor. We hear charges are upto US$ 8 per person in shared vehicle to Siem Reap- you need to check latest prices. The old one was very close to Angkor and in fact, you could see the main temple, if seated on the left side as you approached for landing.

We took the Singapore Airways route, the usual well known SQ424 flight with a 1.5-hour stopover at Singapore Changi and then the new B737 Max to Siem Reap, about 2 hours away. The connecting flight to Siem Reap was from a different terminal but in Changi transfers are all easy and fast thru the inter-terminal train. Remember though, that unlike India, in Changi, the security checks are at the boarding gates, not at one central point. Plus, the staff there are rather rough about not letting water bottles of any kind get through. Much is good about Singapore, but this attitude is unnecessary (have seen and gone through this roughness more than once now).

This SQ flight is sometimes delayed as it’s the only one in the morning giving connections to Siem Reap; so, if you miss this, then you lose the day; our flight was also held back a bit to await some passengers from elsewhere, but there wasn’t any major delay. Apprehensions about the B737 MAX have faded a bit, and most people, I think, did not even realize it was the much-debated aircraft they were riding on.

The flight was uneventful, though I do think Singapore Airlines product has deteriorated slightly in terms of food quality and quantity; or it may be that unlike a few years ago, we have flown on several airlines, so our perspective is better now. Nevertheless, there is nothing much to complain about!

The old Siem Reap airport was bare bones. Nice and neat, but that’s about all. The new one apparently will be much more modern, but doubtful if we will visit Seam Reap again, so can’t comment on it.