Stakeholders work together to boost tourism in HCM City

HCM CITY — A month into the "Viet Nam – Your Destination" programme, tourism agencies, local administrations, hotels and restaurants in HCM City are acting together to ensure its success.
The focus, experts have said, is on designing new products and improving service quality in order to attract both local and foreign visitors.
The programme gauges the popularity of various sites through visitors' votes and identifies top products and services that can be marketed more effectively.
The "HCM City – 100 exciting things" programme that identifies top ten products and services in 10 different categories is being persisted with this year, after having some impact under last year's "Impressive Viet Nam" campaign.
HCM City is also organising several programmes to celebrate the 1,000th anniversary of Thang Long-Ha Noi – the national landmark event of the year.
The Viet Nam National Tourism Administration (VNAT) has joined hands with the Viet Nam Trade Promotion Agency under the Ministry of Industry and Trade and national flag air carrier Viet Nam Airlines to launch a grand sales campaign to stimulate domestic demand.
Under this programme, domestic tour packages would become cheaper based on discounted airfares, while travel firms, hotels, restaurants, and service providers are encouraged to slash their fees by 10 – 30 per cent to attract more visitors during the low season.
Travel firms themselves have intensified promotion activities, including establishing cooperative relationships with neighbouring countries' cities and provinces in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar.
City officials, meanwhile, have pledged to speed up tourism-related infrastructure work.
The city expects to attract 2.8 million international visitors in 2010, up 7 per cent over last year, with the number of local travellers increasing by 15-20 per cent.
In the first four months of this year, the city served 1.08 million foreign visitors (an increase of 9 per cent year-on-year), and the tourism sector earned revenues estimated at VND5.022 trillion (US$ 266 million).