Tourist promotion to offer big discounts

The tourism sector launched a promotion campaign in Hanoi on March 12, offering discounts of between 10% and 30% on tourist services.
The Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) expects that the ‘Vietnam -Your Destination’ programme will help it fulfil the yearly targets of 4.2 million foreign arrivals and 28 million domestic holidaymakers.
The Head of the Travel Department under the VNAT, Vu The Binh, said the campaign will focus on overseas Vietnamese to encourage them to promote Vietnam’s image.
So far, about 80% of foreign arrivals say they based their decision to travel to Vietnam on the recommendation of someone who had visited, Binh said, explaining the VNAT’s policy.
The ‘Vietnam’s Impression’ campaign launched by the VNAT last year considerably contributed to increasing the hospitality industry’s revenues by 9% year-on-year to some VND 70 trillion.
The VNAT reported that foreign arrivals in Vietnam surged by 27.4 percent year-on-year to almost 880,000 in this year’s first two months.
China took the lead with the number of arrivals into Vietnam reaching some 137,000 or an increase of 90.8% compared to the corresponding period last year.
Other major markets such as the Republic of Korea and Japan also showed signs of a rally with the number of arrivals up by 24.4% and 5.8% year on year.