Vietnam’s tourist industry marks 55th anniversary amid challenges
Vietnam’s tourist industry marks 55th anniversary amid challenges
Vietnam is celebrating the 55th anniversary of its tourist industry amid a mountain of challenges, highlighted by falling international tourist numbers.
The Vietnamese tourist industry was founded on July 9, 1960, with the establishment of the first-ever governing body, now known as the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT).
Fifty-five years on, the industry has obtained many achievements, but “new challenges and difficulties have also arisen,” VNAT chief Nguyen Van Tuan admitted in an interview with the Vietnam News Agency last week.
In June, Vietnam’s foreign tourist arrivals suffered the 13th consecutive month-on-month slump, with more than 529,400 visitors, down 1.9 percent compared to the same month last year, Tuan said.
Only 3.8 million international tourists visited the Southeast Asian country in the first six months of the year, an 11.3 percent drop from the first half of last year, according to the General Statistics Office.
Since May 2014, Chinese-speaking arrivals, accounting for 25 percent of the country’s international tourist numbers, have plunged due to “many objective factors,” whereas those from Russia, the country’s second biggest market, have also kept declining.
The impact of MERS on South Korea has also added to the burden, as fewer people from that country take overseas trips, Tuan said.
“There are also shortcomings in terms of the environment and the management and quality of tourism services in Vietnam,” the VNAT chief admitted.
Tuan also reiterated the “six biggest fears” of international tourists when visiting Vietnam, as pointed out by Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam in mid-June.
These include overpricing and rip-offs, unsafe traffic, beggars and theft, terrible food safety, poor awareness of environmental protection, and sellers’ bad behavior toward tourists.
“On July 2, the prime minister issued a directive to increase the effectiveness of tourism management, creating a new tool for the tourist industry to completely get rid of these ‘six obsessions’,” Tuan told the Vietnam News Agency.
Bids for improvement
The tourist industry has recently enacted measures to lure back international visitors, including visa waivers for tourists from five more West European countries, namely England, Germany, Italy, France and Spain, and Belarus.
Western Europe is among Vietnam’s traditional tourist markets, with around 700,000 holidaymakers from the region visiting the Southeast Asian country on an annual basis, the Vietnam News Agency quoted Vu The Binh, deputy chairman of the Vietnam Travel Association (VITA), as saying in a separate report on Wednesday.
Besides the free-visa travel policy, the VNAT will cooperate with the VITA and national flag carrier Vietnam Airlines to launch a tourism promotion campaign to attract tourists from these five nations, according to the Vietnam News Agency.
The program includes offering 20-30 percent price reductions on tour services to Vietnam, and creating new packages to attract those wanting to visit Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia or Singapore from Vietnam.
The campaign aims to increase tourist arrivals from Western Europe to Vietnam to 1.1 million between 2016 and 2018.
