VN, Japan to boost joint tourism

The two governments plan to join hands to reach the target of bringing 1 million Japanese visitors to Viet Nam and 200,000 Vietnamese people to Japan in 2015.
Viet Nam-Japan tourism co-operation would focus on exchanging visitors, providing technical support and developing human resources, said Nguyen Manh Cuong, deputy general director of the Viet Nam National Administration of Tourism.
In the fifth meeting of the Viet Nam-Japan Tourism Co-operation Committee last Friday, Cuong said Japan had announced that Viet Nam had been put in the country's list of strategic markets that Japanese visitors would travel to.
In Japan, there were many tourism promotion campaigns to lure Japanese people to come to Viet Nam's central region, especially tourism destinations in Khanh Hoa, Quang Nam, Thua Thien-Hue provinces.
The Japanese side also planned to open a direct flight to the region, which would be a driving force for Viet Nam to upgrade infrastructure to serve tourism development, Cuong added.
Chairman of the Viet Nam Tourism Association (VITA) Vu The Binh said that the association had established two travel clubs in the South and the North to welcome Japanese tourists. At the same time, VITA would call for the most prestigious and professional travelling companies to take part in the campaign of bringing Vietnamese visitors to Japan.
Binh said he hoped with the co-operation between VITA and the Japan Association of Tourism, enterprises of the two countries would have more chances to join hands in developing tourism.
According to the General Statistics Office, Viet Nam welcomed over 6.1 million overseas arrivals in the past 10 months of 2013, up 10.4 per cent against the same period last year.
In the period, the number of Japanese tourists coming to Viet Nam reached 500,000, an increase of 5.6 per cent compared to the same period last year. Meanwhile, in the first eight months of the year, Japan welcomed nearly 53,000 Vietnamese visitors, up by 56 per cent compared to the figure of 2012's corresponding period.
Viet Nam set the goal of welcoming more than 7.4 million travellers in 2013, which can help earn around US$7.9 billion in revenues, up 15.6 per cent from 2012.