Vietnam estimates to welcome more than 673,000 foreign tourists in the first two months of this year, an increase of 15 per cent over the same period last year, according to the General Statistics Office (GSO).
The surge is mainly attributed to the strong influx of overseas Vietnamese returning to visit their relatives during the Lunar New Year holidays, which fell on January 28-Feberuary 2, and the high inflow of international visitors coming to the communist country to enjoy tourism festivals and events.
The GSO, however, reported a slight on-month decrease of 0.3 per cent in February.
Other indexes from SGO showed an on-year increase of foreigners flocking to the communist nation for business, visiting relatives, tourism, and other purposes.
Particularly, visitors coming to the communist country to do business registered the highest rate with an increase of 38.6 per cent. Followed by those arriving to the country for holiday with 13.2 per cent, visiting relatives with 11.4 per cent, and for other purposes with 8.6 per cent.
During the period, the number of international visitors to the country for holiday saw the on-month decrease by 1.1 per cent in comparison with that of January. Meanwhile, those arriving for business witnessed a rise of 22.7 per cent against last month.
The decrease was allegedly attributed to the fact that many tourism events are in the conclusion stage, and the holiday period is coming to an end.
Among 31 listed markets, Vietnam witnessed on-year falls in only four markets, namely China, Hong Kong, Italy, and the Philippines. Among the four, China posted the highest fall of 31.9 per cent, followed by Hong Kong at 28 per cent.
Unofficial sources attributed the drop in the influx of tourists from China to the northern country’s policy on limiting cross-border travel to curb the number of Chinese people gambling in Vietnam.
Nevertheless, in February, China still remained Vietnam’s number one tourism market with nearly 96,277 arrivals. The runners up were: the US with 83,295, up 31.8 per cent, South Korea with 80,900 vacationers, up 57 per cent, and Japan with 58,590, up 29.1 per cent, in comparison with figures from the same period last year.
Notably, the GSO also revealed that Norway became the country having the on-year strongest proportion of visitors to Vietnam in January- February with 86.9 per cent. The following were Russia with over 72 per cent, Cambodia with 64.7 per cent, and South Korea with 57 per cent.
In 2005, Vietnam saw around 3.34 million foreign tourists and 15 million domestic tourists, up 18.4 per cent and 7.6 per cent on-year respectively, earning revenue of VND30 trillion (US$1.91 billion), up 14 per cent from the year 2004.
The Vietnamese National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) has set a target to host as many as 20.9 million tourists. Of them, 3.9 million are predicted to be foreign arrivals, with the remaining 17 million being domestic vacationers, an on-year increase of 14 per cent and 6.3 per cent respectively.
T.V
Vietnamese
