The tourism industry is gradually removing bottlenecks and accelerating to regain what has been lost. In particular, communication and destination promotion work is mentioned by many businesses and experts as a "bottleneck" that prevents Vietnam's tourism from booming.
Vietnam is trying to attract international visitors.
There is a new policy, must "shout" immediately!
"If these visa and immigration policies are approved, we must immediately promote them to tourists so that they can proactively apply for visas to Vietnam . Avoid the situation of opening the door but no one knows, missing the opportunity like when tourism first opened after Covid-19. No matter how beautiful Vietnam is, how new the products are, how open the door is, if tourists do not know, they will not come," Mr. Nguyen Chau A, Director of Oxalis Travel Company, noted.
The missed opportunity that Mr. Nguyen Chau A mentioned is still a regret of many people working in the tourism industry. After officially removing all barriers to disease control in order to be determined to get ahead in the race to attract international visitors in March 2022, Vietnam almost took full advantage. Compared to Thailand at that time, Vietnam was much more open when it only required a negative test result, no need for quarantine, and visa application procedures were restored to pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, Thailand still applied the "Test and Go" program with the regulation that international visitors must quarantine for 1 night at a hotel waiting for a PCR test, and if positive, they must continue to quarantine for 14 days. Not to mention, the quarantine price is also quite high, including transportation from the airport to the hotel, meals... However, paradoxically, Thailand has risen to "grab" all the first tourists to travel again, especially individual travelers traveling on their own, while we have opened the door wide and are still waiting for no guests to come in. The reason is that the other country has issued a complete, thorough, and detailed entry process on the media, while Vietnam at that time was still vague and had no information. When there were specific regulations, there was no strong communication, no one knew, so few people chose Vietnam .
Need wider and stronger promotion to create destination awareness
Vietnam tourism needs systematic, professional, long-term and continuous investment to be able to take advantage of competitive advantages and quickly recover. Travel companies need to change their model towards B2C, that is, selling directly to tourists, limiting the use of foreign partners to proactively develop new products and proactively capture the market. At the same time, the General Department of Tourism needs to have broader and stronger destination promotion programs. It is necessary to spend more money to create destination awareness. Once there is awareness, businesses will be able to sell products more easily.
Mr. Nguyen Chau A, Director of Oxalis Travel Company
Mr. Nguyen Chau A commented that marketing and communication have always been the weakest points of Vietnamese tourism. Even Son Doong Cave is famous as one of the most magnificent caves in the world, but if you ask 10 Singaporeans, all 10 of them say they don't know. For a long time, Vietnam has mainly "relied" on foreign partners to "help" with communication. 80% of international visitors to Vietnam are brought by foreign companies. Most Vietnamese travel companies are operating under the B2B model, which means they only build products and offer them to partners so they can sell them to tourists. This model was still successful before the pandemic because the market depended heavily on Asian tourists, mainly traveling in groups. However, the European and American tourist markets are different. Travel companies bringing European tourists to Vietnam do not spend much money to promote the destination, so tourists rarely know about Vietnam and the number of tourists choosing to travel to Vietnam is still limited.
"Because businesses mainly promote tourism in the form of B2B, the tourism industry only supports roadshows and some promotional programs. We have very few destination promotion programs. The current context has seen major changes in tourism models, especially European and American tourists. They prefer self-sufficient, exploratory, and experiential tourism models. If information and images of destinations are not widely communicated and promoted, it will be very disadvantageous for us in the competition," Mr. Chau A assessed.
Foreign tourists visit Cai Rang floating market, Can Tho
Promotion cost is 1/50 of Thailand
Before the pandemic, on average, each year, the General Department of Tourism participated in about 20 major international fairs such as Travex, ITB (Germany), MITT (Russia), Jata (Japan) ..., organized 10 - 15 tourist groups in the form of acquaintance and marketing (famtrip, presstrips) to introduce Vietnam 's outstanding destinations and tourism services, and carried out more than 20 mobile art performances (roadshows) in key foreign markets. Even domestically, localities also made great efforts to organize many events to attract tourists from all over the world. After the pandemic, Vietnam's tourism promotion activities have also been greatly upgraded in scale, changing many methods such as actively bringing Vietnam's image to famous world television channels, promoting tourism through cinema, cuisine ...
However, a leader of the General Department of Tourism admitted that the biggest difficulty in promoting Vietnam's tourism is funding. Vietnam 's tourism promotion budget is 2 million USD per year, while countries in the region such as Thailand spend about 86 million USD, Malaysia about 130 million USD and Singapore spends 100 million USD. To solve the funding problem, at the end of 2018, the Prime Minister issued a decision to establish a Tourism Development Support Fund, but to date the fund has not yet established its apparatus and cannot be put into operation. The model has never been implemented, so it is difficult in terms of human resources, apparatus and mechanism.
International visitors to Vietnam in May decreased
According to the General Statistics Office, international arrivals to Vietnam in May were estimated at 916,300, down 6.9% compared to the previous month. In the first 5 months of 2023, Vietnam welcomed nearly 4.6 million international arrivals, 12.6 times higher than the same period last year but still only 63% compared to the same period in 2019, before the pandemic. Domestic accommodation and food service revenue in the past 5 months increased by 22.1%, estimated at VND 268,300 billion; tourism revenue increased by 89.4%, estimated at VND 11,600 billion due to many holidays in the month.
In addition, Vietnam has only opened 3 tourism representative offices abroad (in Japan, South Korea and the UK), while Thailand currently has 29 offices in 3 major continents, including 18 representative offices in Asia, 8 offices in Europe and 3 in North America; Malaysia has 35 tourism representative offices abroad; Singapore has 23 offices; South Korea has 31 offices.
"In tourism promotion and advertising, the first task is to target, penetrate and exploit the market. Having representative offices in the markets is very important. However, for many reasons, up to now, Vietnam 's tourism promotion offices in the markets are still very limited. This is also one of the great disadvantages of the Vietnamese tourism industry in the competition for destinations," said the leader of the General Department of Tourism.
Mr. Cao Tri Dung, Chairman of the Da Nang Tourism Association, said that the story of promoting and advertising tourism, linking localities to create a system of new and attractive products are issues that need to be resolved quickly to create momentum for Vietnamese tourism.
"The tourism industry has shown great determination, but one industry alone is not enough. Tourism wants to promote but allocates little budget. The annual promotion budget of Vietnam's tourism is only about 1/50 of Thailand's. No matter how hard we try, with such little resources, the destination brand cannot rise quickly. Businesses are expecting that from Decree 82, the Prime Minister will have specific and strong policies, paving the way for ministries and branches to quickly implement solutions to remove difficulties for the tourism industry in accordance with the goal of making tourism a spearhead economic sector," said Mr. Cao Tri Dung.
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