Vietnam Tourism Looking to the Nature

In 2010, Vietnam achieved the target of attracting 5 million international visitor arrivals and 28 million domestic tourists and attained a record VND 70 trillion turnover.

 

Remarking on the performance of the tourism sector last year, Dr Pham Trung Luong said that the figure alone was very impressive. Struggling with global economic crisis in 2009, Vietnam attracted only 3.72 million international visitors but the nation welcomed 5 million foreign visitors in 2010, a very high growth rate. This achievement presents great efforts of the entire industry.

 

However, many factors were unable to be interpreted into figures. Many localities and tourist sites made impressive progress in tourism development and targeted at high-spending visitors. In addition, human resource training was focused; thus, the social awareness of tourism was improved.

 

Besides, in 2010, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism required the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) to carry many major tourism development projects and plans for the upcoming period, particularly the tourism industry development strategy until 2020 and towards to 2030. It also outlined many important projects like Sea and Island Tourism Development Project until 2030, Border Tourism Development Project and Poverty Reduction Project. These are very strategic orientations and lay the foundation for the next 10-year development and beyond. This is also a laudable success in 2010.

 

Particularly, it is noted that Vietnam successfully organised many big international promotional activities and hosted the Great Anniversary of 1,000 years of Thang Long - Hanoi. Such activities partly contributed to deepening an image of land and people of Vietnam in the process of international integration.

Results in 2010 are noteworthy but Vietnam should not be overoptimistic about what it achieved. Actually, apart from the efforts of the entire industry, the impressive growth of international arrivals was partly resulted from turmoil in Thailand and Indonesia. Thus, Vietnam became a favourite alternative last year. The Vietnamese tourism sector should look at the nature of the impressive growth.

 

Besides, the quality of visitors did not come up with Vietnam’s expectations. For long, the Vietnamese tourism industry prefers looking at real figures, not how much those figures give to the country and how many jobs they create for the society. According to Associate Professor Luong, the Vietnamese tourism industry did well in 2010 but it is not necessary to be overoptimistic. Vietnam should look to the nature of efficiency of other activities like promotion and advertisement to make them work better with limited budget. And, the tourism sector failed to do this. In addition, the sector must focus more on human resource development for specific stages to suit the budget and policies. The quality of products, services and other activities needs objective assessment. In the Vietnam tourism development strategy for the 2011-2020 period, Vietnam should shift to its intensive development and take quality to raise revenues of tourism.