Tourism sector turns to domestic market

Vietnam is sprucing itself up to lure more tourists to local and regional tour routes in a bid to cope with a drop in the number of foreign visitors, triggered by the global economic downturn and widespread A/H1N1 flu outbreak. Only 2.2 million foreign travellers had, by the end of July, arrived in Vietnam, down 18.7 percent from a year ago.
Despite this, General Director of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism Nguyen Van Tuan still expresses his optimism that the country’s total tourism revenue will not shrink thanks to a strategic shift by his sector to more aggressively court domestic tourists, saying that “further efforts should be made to boost the number of local travellers”.
The number of local visitors surged 13 percent in the January-July period and the tourism sector raked in around 32.4 trillion VND in social income in the first half of the year. The figure is expected to reach 22 million people by the end of this year and to double or triple in the next few years.
The increase is riding on the back of the sector’s promotion campaigns, its effective coordination with other sectors, including aviation and hotels, and its efforts to minimise the risks posed by the A/H1N1 flu outbreak.
From now to the end of this year, the tourism sector will attach special importance to deploying a series of national tourism promotion programmes and responding to programmes for the thousand-year Thang Long-Hanoi anniversary and national tourism year 2010.
The Vietnamese government has recently given joint ventures the green light to organise outbound tours and allowed, on a pilot basis, certain hotels to keep their entertainment venues open until 2 am.