In recent years, development of tourism, services, and the hotel sector has become new industry that draws more and more investment to Vietnam. Vietnam Business Forum magazine conducted an interview with Nguyen Thanh Phong, director of the Dong An Beach Hotel – one of the most famous hotels in Hoi An, wholly managed by Vietnamese.
What are the advantages and position of the Dong An Beach Hotel?
The biggest advantage of the Dong An Beach Hotel is its natural landscape with lots of favourable geographic conditions. The hotel lies at the intersection of De Vong River and Cua Dai seaport, which creates poetic and dreamlike scenery with rivers and mountains. It has an auspicious position, 4 kilometers from the Hoi An town, 30 km from Danang Airport, 60 km from My Son holy land, and 120 km from the former imperial capital of Hue. Perhaps, one of the reasons that attracts tourists is that the hotel has wild natural landscape and it is positioned near to the country’s famous tourist sites.
Dong An Beach Hotel was built in 2002 and inaugurated in November 2003. After two years of operation, Dong An hotel has established a stable foothold in the tourism sector in Hoi An. The hotel has 81 rooms at present and is planning to build two more rooms. The hotel has one ship to serve visitors who want to travel around the beach. Knowing that gastronomy is one of the main cultural features of the Central Region we have expanded the restaurants and serve the regionally characterized specialties. We have also focused on using traditional specialties of Hoi An.
Dong An is considered one of the first enterprises to invest in modern and luxurious hotel in Quang Nam province. Could you talk about the difficulties that Dong An Beach Hotel is facing at present?
The greatest difficulty that the hotel is faced with is a lack of master and synchronous strategic planning In addition, post and telecommunication networks, the internet, cable television, waste processing system and environment protection have not received sufficient investment.
In your opinion, to fully tap the potential of the tourism sector in the central region, what does the Dong An Hotel in particular, and the whole tourism system here in general, need to do? And what policies does the Government need to issue?
The lack of coordination between hotel and service businesses is a shortcoming in Hoi An. To tap the full potential of this nature-favored land, tourism and service enterprises need closer cooperation for a synchronous development. The problem is that a strategy for synchronic development needs to be established. The waste processing, communication, electricity, water supply, transport and other infrastructure systems need to be invested in with strategic and master plans instead of uncontrolled plans as at present. However, the most important problem is to train the labor force. Investment in to knowledge is the best investment of the tourism and hotel sector.
In Dong An Beach Hotel alone, our orientation is to improve the hotel’s quality under the four-start hotel. We also continue widen market to attract tourists from Russia, East Europe, South Korea, and Japan to enter this beautiful wonderland in central Vietnam.
Kim Hiep
Vietnamese
