Regarding the development of night tourism products, Minister Nguyen Van Hung said that the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has a project, framework and suggested ways to do it, the remaining work "the Ministry cannot do on behalf of the locality."
During the question-and-answer session at the 36th Session of the National Assembly Standing Committee, held this morning (August 21), in Hanoi, Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Nguyen Van Hung said that this unit has a project on night tourism products, with a framework and suggested implementation methods, the remaining task is for localities to have creative ways, research unique, distinctive, and highly competitive tourism products to retain tourists.
In addition, the Minister also proposed solutions to improve the effectiveness of tourism statistics, in order to evaluate, formulate policies and promote effective and sustainable development of Vietnam's tourism.
Will apply tourism satellite account to statistical work
On January 15, 2024, the Prime Minister issued Official Dispatch No. 06/CD-TTg on improving the effectiveness of tourism statistics. This includes the task of promoting cooperation with the World Tourism Organization to improve the quality and effectiveness of tourism statistics at the central and local levels.
Previously, since 2009, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has also proactively researched and developed a methodology for building a tourism statistics system in Vietnam according to the Tourism Satellite Account model.
However, to supplement and complete tourism statistics as well as clearly identify the position of the tourism industry in the overall development of the national economy and localities set out in the Government's Action Program to implement Resolution No. 08-NQ/TW in 2017 of the Politburo, truly breakthrough solutions are needed to promote this task.
Minister Nguyen Van Hung said that the Party and State leaders are very interested in the field of statistics. Because this is an important macro-management tool, helping to grasp information for assessment, orientation, and from there, policy planning. In the field of tourism, the Ministry has advised the Prime Minister to issue Official Dispatch No. 06/CD-TTg of the Prime Minister on improving the effectiveness of tourism statistics to assess, plan policies and promote the effective and sustainable development of Vietnam's tourism in the coming time.
The Minister stated that since the dispatch, tourism statistics have been gradually put into order, and the statistics have become more accurate. In order to serve policy making as well as state management in this field, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has implemented in 6 groups of fields: the number of international visitors, the number of domestic visitors, international visitors' spending, domestic visitors' spending, food and beverage service revenue and travel agency revenue.
Accordingly, these figures are fully reflected in the monthly periodic reports of the General Statistics Office provided to the agencies. However, the Minister admitted that there are still some difficulties in the implementation process, such as in addition to the number of specialized staff for this work stipulated in the law, currently the Departments of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Department of Tourism do not have specialized staff for statistical work.
The Minister also emphasized that “funding for investigation, sampling, research, and analysis has not received due attention. Information technology and software infrastructure to ensure connectivity and data sharing still face many difficulties…”
Therefore, the first solution that the Ministry will continue to focus on in the coming time is to effectively implement the Prime Minister's Official Dispatch No. 06; select groups of solutions that the international tourism organization is recommending for all countries to apply the tourism satellite account to include in statistics.
Second, continue to coordinate with the Ministry of Public Security to use data in Project 06 on Developing applications of data on population, identification and electronic authentication to serve national digital transformation, thereby having a tourism database for more accurate planning.
Third, coordinate with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to collect additional statistics on tourists' demand for agricultural products, shopping, etc. to calculate additional tourist quotas.
"The Ministry does not act on behalf of the locality"
One of the issues the Minister was questioned about in this morning’s meeting was the development of night tourism – a new model that has been receiving a lot of attention recently. Many localities have shifted their focus to developing this tourism product, and have initially shown positive signs.
However, in reality, experts assess that night tourism products in our country are still poor and monotonous, still mainly operating in the traditional form of walking streets and food streets; art and entertainment activities are irregular, mainly taking place on the weekends.
So how can night tourism develop strongly with diverse and rich products, healthy entertainment and retain tourists to stay overnight to stimulate demand for Vietnam's smokeless industry?
Minister Nguyen Van Hung said that the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has a Project on night tourism products, encouraging localities to research based on planning factors to calculate, build product lines and evaluate the market to have products that properly serve and meet customer needs.
The Minister also emphasized what he had stated in the question and answer session of the 7th session of the 15th National Assembly, which took place last June: "As I said, there are many localities that do not do anything but lack it, and do too much, even if they do it, tourists do not come."
In this story, according to Minister Nguyen Van Hung, the main responsibility belongs to the Chairman of the People's Committee, the People's Council of the provinces, not the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. He gave an example of this unit suggesting that Ho Chi Minh City, based on river resources and mainstream product lines, combine the Saigon River with commercial ports to create product lines. On that basis, the City has researched and built Nguyen Hue walking street connecting products on the river, creating space for tourists to come.
The Minister assessed that Ho Chi Minh City has had a creative approach based on the general direction of Directive 08 of the Government and Resolution 82 on the main tasks and solutions to accelerate recovery and accelerate effective and sustainable tourism development, which is each locality has a unique, professional, distinctive and highly competitive tourism product.
“Regarding night tourism, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism already has a project, a framework and suggestions on how to do it, but the Ministry cannot do it for the locality,” Minister Nguyen Van Hung emphasized./.
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