Many Vietnamese celebrate Xmas abroad

 As Christmas is approaching, there has been a surge in both domestic and outbound tours for holiday celebrations. Quite a few tourists have chosen luxurious tours of Europe and the US.
Travelling overseas for shopping
The Saigontourist Travel Service Company says it has launched some high-end tours of Europe to meet Santa Claus and receive gifts on Christmas Eve, tours of the US to view the giant Xmas tree in New York, and tours of Australia to celebrate New Year’s Eve. The company also offers tours of nearer countries and territories such as China, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong with diverse itineraries, reasonable prices and attractive promotions.
Other travel companies like Viettravel, Hanoi Red tour, Fiditour, and Hanoitourist say each of them has planned overseas tours (from December 24, 2009 to January 1, 2010) for between 1,500-2,000 tourists, an increase of 25-30 percent compared to a year earlier. Most of their customers have registered for tours of Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. The latter two are chosen by many individuals and organizations because their major shopping centres offer massive discounts at the end of the year. The attractiveness of foreign tours also stems from the fact that airfare has gone up only slightly.
Various domestic tours follow
Saigontourist says 2,000 domestic tourists have registered for its tours, up 5 percent from 2008. The company’s tours of Da Lat city to welcome the New Year and attend the Da Lat Flower Festival have attracted the largest number of tourists. Many foreigners will also arrive in the Central Highland city to attend the festival. The occupation rates of hotels and inns here are expected to soar as many other travel companies also organize tours of the city.
In addition, a wide range of companies have devised many cultural tours of Hanoi to learn about the capital’s history and the north’s cuisine. Saigontourist offer tours of the former capital city of Hoa Lu, which is just 90km from Hanoi, and Viettravel provides six-day tours of Hanoi, Yen Tu, Ha Long and Sapa, and four-day yacht tours of Ha Long, Ninh Binh and Trang An.
Meanwhile, Fiditour has launched brief tours of Vietnamese islands with reasonable prices and promotions.
New impetus for tourism industry
The Director General of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, Nguyen Van Tuan, says the campaign of promotions and discounts launched in early 2009 has kicked in, especially for domestic tourism, which attracted an estimated 25 million tourists in 2009, a 15 percent rise against 2008, showing revenue increases of between 8-10 percent.
The number of international arrivals to Vietnam dropped in October but surged in November with 231,000 tourists, up 19 percent. Most of the tourists came from Japan, Western Europe, and North America. The national tourism agency predicts many more foreign tourists will come in December and early 2010. This is expected to build up momentum for the whole year during which many major national events will take place.
The tourism sector is conducting new campaigns to attract tourists, with a focus on markets that have quickly recovered from the global economic crisis such as China, Japan, the Republic of Korea and ASEAN, targeting more than 4.2 million international tourists in 2010./.