Is the Techo International Airport the best thing to ever happen to Cambodian tourism, or a big fat white elephant? Well like most things the answer is not just nuanced, but a little bit of all of the above.
Although you would almost not realise there was even so much controversy connected to the airport were you just to inhale the sycophantic views and news reports about the place.
After visiting Techo International Airport on opening day, YPT recently flew out to cut through the hype and share a real guide to Cambodia’s newest airport in Phnom Penh.
The Techo International Airport Story
The story of Techo International Airport is basically modern Cambodian politics in concrete form. First announced way back in 2018, the idea was to create a flashy new hub to rival Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City. It was also pitched as a way of reducing Cambodia’s dependence on Pochentong, the ageing Phnom Penh airport that, shock horror, still worked perfectly fine.
Construction officially began in 2019 with the usual fanfare of ribbon cuttings and speeches about “boosting tourism” and “regional hub potential.” Then came Covid, which not only decimated Cambodian tourism, but also froze most of the building work. Yet, rather than scrap or scale back, the government doubled down, borrowing more and letting Chinese state-linked firms bankroll the project.
Ownership wise, the whole thing is wrapped in layers of Chinese loans, Cambodian cronies, and the Hun family’s fingerprints all over it. The original opening date was supposed to be 2023, then 2024, and finally we ended up with a September 2025 debut. By that point, most people had forgotten it was even being built.
So was it built for tourists? Kind of. Was it built to massage egos and show off shiny infrastructure even when visitor numbers are down the toilet? Absolutely.
The Base Facts about Techo International Airport
Now for the sexy statistics. Techo International sits on 2,600 hectares of land, which makes it one of the largest airports in Southeast Asia by footprint. It has a shiny 4-kilometre runway that can handle anything up to an Airbus A380, and eventually will have three runways once they bother to finish the other phases.
Passenger capacity in phase one is supposed to be around 13 million a year, eventually hitting 30 million by 2030 and a staggering 50 million sometime before half of us are dead. To put this into perspective, the old Phnom Penh airport had a capacity of 6 million, but in 2024 handled fewer than 5 million passengers. So yeah, you can kind of see the problem.
In short, Cambodia built an airport that can theoretically handle as many passengers as London Heathrow one day, while struggling to attract the same numbers as a rainy provincial airport in Wales. Yep thats a real stat you got there.
Location location location (and how to get here)
The biggest irony of Techo International is that it isn’t even in Phnom Penh. It’s stuck out in Kandal province, about 20–23 kilometres south of the city. That might not sound like much, but in Phnom Penh traffic it can feel like a lifetime.
How to get there or escape once you land:
- Grab Car: Expect to pay around $15–20 into central Phnom Penh depending on traffic
- Grab TukTuk: Cheaper at around $8–10, but only for those who enjoy a dust-filled slow death on Highway 2
- Airport Bus: Rumoured to exist, cheap as chips (around $2) but irregular and about as fast as walking
- Private Taxi: Hotels will gouge you around $25–30, but at least it’s direct
Moral of the story? Factor in an extra hour if you actually care about making your flight.
What’s at the Techo International Airport?
Once you finally get inside, you’re greeted by a terminal that feels less like Cambodia and more like a generic Chinese transport hub. The design is sleek, modern, and utterly soulless. Inside you’ll find a mixture of local cafés selling iced coffee, a few noodle joints, and then the one global constant of modern travel: Starbucks, because God forbid anywhere be spared.
There are also way too many souvenir shops peddling Angkor Wat keyrings and tacky “I love Cambodia” T-shirts, all at three times the market rate. Half the shop units are still empty, which means large parts of the terminal feel more like a shopping mall that went bankrupt before it opened.
On the plus side, it’s clean, it’s spacious, and the air conditioning actually works. On the minus side, it feels like you’re wandering around a movie set rather than a real place.
The Overall Vibe
The vibe at Techo International is surreal. It’s not quite a full-blown white elephant, because planes do actually land here and people do shuffle through security. But it does have that distinct Chinese ghost city atmosphere, with wide open halls echoing with emptiness.
It is oddly comparable to the new Siem Reap airport, which opened in 2023 with much the same fanfare and is now basically a ghost terminal waiting for tourists who never arrived. You walk through Techo International and you can’t help but feel it’s cool to have such a massive space all to yourself, but then that nagging thought pops up: “Was it worth billions of dollars of debt?”
Short answer: probably not.
Do They Need the Airport?
This is the elephant in the departure lounge. Did Cambodia actually need a new international airport in Phnom Penh? Tourist arrivals collapsed during Covid and still haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Even in the best of times, the old airport wasn’t hitting maximum capacity.
So why build a mega-airport? Prestige, ego, and the never-ending need to look like you’re playing in the big leagues. The billions poured into concrete could arguably have been better spent improving actual tourism infrastructure, cleaning up Sihanoukville, fixing the Siem Reap tourist scam industry, or just making the visa process less of a hassle.
But instead, we got a giant, gleaming new airport that Cambodia doesn’t really need. Will it eventually get used if numbers recover? Maybe. Was it necessary in 2025? Absolutely not.
Conclusion: nice airport, but Cambodia should have fixed its tourism industry before building a giant shiny box in a rice field.
From touchdown at Techo International Airport to exploring temples, markets, Khmer culture, and the country’s Khmer Rouge past, YPT’s Cambodia tours are the best way to see the real Cambodia.
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