Bokeo set to open fourth Lao-Thai Friendship Bridge
Bokeo set to open fourth Lao-Thai Friendship Bridge
The people of Bokeo province are ready to welcome hundreds of guests from the local community and Thailand for the opening ceremony of the 4th Lao-Thai Friendship Bridge.
The bridge links Bokeo province with Chiang Rai province in Thailand across the Mekong River.
The exact date of the ceremony has yet to be announced, but is expected to be sometime next month. The government will discuss the details of the ceremony with Thai officials, according to the Foreign Ministry.
In preparation for visitors, Bokeo officials are checking the quality of service at hotels, guesthouses, beverage shops and entertainment venues.
“We are satisfied with what we've found because all services are good in terms of quality,” an official from the provincial Information, Culture and Tourism Department, Ms Bouachin Chayasoupha, told Vientiane Times on Wednesday.
Officials have been checking the standard of service in terms of qualified staff, cooking equipment, kitchens, and room cleaning.
Only a few guesthouses were found to have a quality of service lower than that set by the Ministry of Information, Culture and Tourism.
This was attributed to the fact that their owners had insufficient staff to maintain the premises.
Ms Bouachin said the owners of these guesthouses had promised officials they would hire more staff as quickly as possible.
“We are looking for a reasonable standard of service, not for international quality,” she pointed out.
Most of the staff working in guesthouses have had no training because the owners prefer to employ their relatives to work at reception or do the house-keeping.
Hotels and restaurants throughout the country are in desperate need of staff, following a rapid surge in tourism in recent years.
Bokeo officials have checked out nine hotels, 11 guesthouses, 27 restaurants, one garden restaurant, 40 restaurant and function halls, and 23 karaoke clubs.
The foreign ministry said this week Laos has completed work on the border checkpoint facilities and the bridge on the Bokeo side. It now remains for Thailand to complete its construction work before the bridge is opened to the public.
The number of Thai tourists visiting Bokeo province is expected to double once the bridge is open.
The new river crossing is also expected to boost visitor numbers from Malaysia, Vietnam and Singapore in the future, while more visitors are expected from Japan and the Republic of Korea.
In the first six months of 2013, upwards of 200,000 tourists visited Bokeo province, while in the whole of 2012, more than 300,000 came to the area.
The increase is part of an overall national trend – in 2011, 2.7 million tourists visited Laos, which jumped to 3.4 million in 2012.
The government is targeting 3.7 million annual tourist arrivals by 2015, which would generate about US$500 million in revenue.
vientiane times
