In accordance with the statistics of Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT)’s Travel Department, revenues from the tourism by railway remains modest compared to others, accounting for about 7 per cent. Apart from a few railway tourism routes which are underway effectively like Hanoi-Lao Cai; Saigon - Ninh Thuan - Nha Trang, the remaining routes are mostly not exploited.
Besides limitation of weak infrastructures, the service quality on trains is very poor while the coordination between the railway sector and tourism sector is approximately equal to zero, leading to the stagnancy of this kind of tourism.
Vietnam Business Forum reporter Thu Huyen interviewed Mr Nguyen Quy Phuong, Vice Head of the VNAT Travel Department on the two sectors’ coordination and solutions to boost the relationship in upcoming time.
How do you assess the coordination between the railway sector and the tourism sector to boost the latter?
Transport is an important element to the development of the tourism sector. However, over the past years the cooperation between the tourism and railway sectors have not yet been expanded despite authorities have offered rules relating to that represented via the two laws on railway and tourism, respectively. In fact as carrying out railway transport business, enterprises of the two sectors have also joined hands to open some tourism routes including Hanoi - Lao Cai; Hanoi – Vinh; Saigon – Nha Trang. However, these routes have not yet operated really effectively due to the lack of professionalism in investment operations.
The Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism have cooperated to grant own license plates for tourism passenger vehicles. Because the railway transport has different features from the road transport, only one railway line or railroad cars managed by only the Vietnam Railways for example, I think that in the upcoming time, the two above-mentioned ministries should also regulate standards of tourism trains such as standards on railroad car; equipment and services.
Besides, it is necessary to pay attention to the two sector’s coordination, particularly between state agencies; localities in building railway infrastructures, including stations, railway network, railway business. Travel agents need to join hands to study the demand of tourists in order to possibly provide standard services. I expect that tourism and railway managers will early sit together to outline timely and suitable policies to the development of railway tourism as well as encourage enterprises to invest into the tourism transport field while tourism firms should pay further attention to the transport mean by railway.
The issue is possible to be solved overnight. In your opinion, which would the two sectors do in the near future to push up the development of railway tourism?
The railway sector needs large investments. In the coming period, besides upgrading road-bed, the improvement of services on trains is very important. The improvement necessarily covers the quality of equipment, staff team. In addition, upgrading railway stations is not less important. One of worries currently is the capacity of railway transport. During rush occasions like Tet and national festivals, almost all of stations and trains are overloaded. Regarding the issue, the sector needs to raise further the management and service quality at stations.
As for the Travel Department, which operations have been made to increase the cooperation between travel agents and the railway sector?
The Travel Department has for many times worked with the Vietnam Railway General Company, the precursor of the Viet Nam Railways Corporation, on policies to encourage more investments into the railway sector. In fact, there have had many enterprises pouring capitals to upgrade railroad cars on a number of routes such as Lao Cai, Vinh, Nha Trang. Particularly, for the routes on which the railway transport has advantage of competition, we have called on travel agents to exploit tours by train. Another issue the two sides have discussed is the train timetable. Travel agents all expect the railway sector will give more priority policies on investment, on passenger transport as well as adjust the timetable of routes to be suitable to tours; improve services on train, contributing to attract more Vietnamese and foreign tourists, particularly in long-day holidays.
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