The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism will organize a national conference in Hanoi next month to discuss ways to boost its sea-borne hospitality sector, an official from the Travel Department of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, said.
The conference will be attended by hundreds of leading tourism officials, experts and travel companies, the official said without revealing detailed contents of the conference.
The local non-smoke industry does not have a single infrastructure development strategy to develop sea tourism.
“We lack the strategy, promotional activities and key infrastructure such as cruise terminals, for receiving the guests,” said Nguyen Anh Tuan, a senior expert of the Travel Department.
Since 2002, Vietnam has received more than 300,000 cruise ship visitors. However, the SARS outbreak in 2003 caused many potential tourists to travel elsewhere.
With efforts of tour operators who have contributed to the increasing number of cruise ship visitors through establishing new partnerships and calling on cruise ships to come through Vietnam, the number of sea visitors has been recovering in recent times.
HCM City is a major destination for receiving cruise passengers in the country, but does not have a proper cruise terminal, Tuan said.
Experts believe that sea tourism is booming in Asia because cruise ship passengers have grown too familiar with the Caribbean and South America and Europe is too expensive for some travelers. As a result, a handful of Asian countries are constructing infrastructure to receive these passengers.
A cruise terminal in Vietnam was mentioned in the 2007-2010 Tourism Development Program, but no further headway has been made.
Vietnam welcomed more than 224,000 sea passenger arrivals in 2006, accounting for 6.25 per cent of the total number of tourists to the whole country last year. (VietNamNet)
Vietnamese
