Vietnam, a country of five world tangible heritage sites, is expected to need an additional 50,000 hotel rooms in the next four years to serve 31 million tourists, including 6 million international visitors and 25 million domestic tourists, a recent meeting was told.
Vietnam’s tourism industry is facing a severe shortage of hotel rooms despite quick development in the past few years, said Pham Tu, deputy Head of Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT).
“We have increased the number of hotel rooms from 57,000 in 1998 to 130,000 last year. But that will not be enough to meet the increasing figure of tourists to the country in the years to come,” he added, revealing that the quality of recent hotel rooms is also a matter of concern.
According to the VNAT, Vietnam now has nearly 6,000 accommodation venues with 130,000 rooms and 2,600 one-to five-star hotels including 48 four-star with 5,797 rooms, and 116 three-star with 8,330 rooms.
However, star-standardized hotels are allocated unequally. Twenty-four provinces and cities have three-star-hotels, 12 provinces have four-star-hotels and only five provinces and cities have five-star-hotels.
VNAT envisions huge demand for investment that amounts to billions of US dollars. The tourism watchdog will launch many investment promotions to call for more local and foreign investors to build more hotels in the country.
To this end, the VNAT will organize tourism investment conferences to introduce potential projects to investors, and conduct investment survey trips for investors. The authority will also coordinate with the Ministry of Planning and Investment to bring out special preferential investment policies.
Vietnam welcomed some 1.6 million foreign tourists in the first five months of this year, representing a year-on-year increase of 12 per cent, according to General Statistics Office (GSO) which was released on May 29.
It expects total revenue from tourism in 2010 to reach $4-5 billion, double the 2005 figure.
Saigon Times Daily
Vietnamese
