Foreign visitors figures to Vietnam were down by 5.3% in the first four months of 2013, a situation which a Deputy Minister blamed on insufficient funds to promote the country…
HANOI- Foreign tourists to Vietnam made only 2.4 million trips in the first four months of 2013. This represents a decrease of 5.3% compared to the same period last year, reported the Vietnam General Statistics Office (GSO) on Friday.
This seems to be a worrying trend: foreign tourists arriving by air reached only two million , a number down by 6.4%, compared to 348,000 travellers coming by road (+1.3%) and 78,600 travellers by ships (- 3.7%).
During the four-month period, 1.5 million foreigners came to Vietnam for tourist purpose, down 3.8 % year on year, and another 406,400 visitors came for business, down 5.4 %. The largest incoming market is China with 547,500 travellers, up by 6.7%. China is followed by South Korea (280,100) and Japan (205,000 travellers).
Vietnam received 6.8 million foreign visitors in 2012, earning a revenue of nearly seven billion U.S. dollars, an increase of 13.8% year on year. The country expects to pass the seven million travellers’ mark in 2013.
However, this evolution generates concern among Government’s officials. Local media reported that the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nguyen Thanh Son, declared to feel ashamed of the stagnation of Vietnam’s tourism. While tourism is considered as the key industry which can more easily make money than many other industries in the context of the global economic crisis, it has not made any considerable progress over the last many years.
The comment by Son appeared at the end of March in Tuoi tre newspaper following an embarrassing story at ITB where a picture displayed at the Vietnamese booth represented in fact a Chinese and not a Vietnamese landscape. The Minister blamed the unprofessionalism of Vietnam National Administration of Tourism for the mistake and also for the poor results in terms of tourism evolution. The Deputy Minister explained that VNAT did not succeed in making a more efficient cooperation between localities and travel firms to attract more tourists.
Nguyen Van Tuan, VNAT’s General Director then replied that VNAT would ask Son for an open dialogue about the problems of Vietnam’s tourism. Tuan particularly blames the lack of budget for tourism promotion campaigns. With a budget of only 1.5 to 2 million dollars, Vietnam remains far behind other countries in the region which generally can spend up to 100 million US dollars for campaigning.
Meanwile, long and complicated visa procedures, economic recession in many important inbound markets –especially from Europe- are probably two other plausible explanations to Vietnam’s mediocre performance this year…
(Partial source from Xinhua.net)
Luc Citrinot a French national is a freelance journalist and consultant in tourism and air transport with over 20 years experience. Based in Paris and Bangkok, he works for various travel and air transport trade publications in Europe and Asia.
