For many years, the tourism brand Saigontourist has been familiar to visitors from home and abroad, strongly impressing them with product variety, service quality and by bringing travellers interesting experiences. In the first three months of 2011, despite difficulties, its revenue increased by 13 per cent against the same period of last year. Reporter Anh Dao interviewed Tran Hung Viet, Vice General Director of Saigontourist, on the company’s continuous efforts to build the brand quality and mark itself as the leading tour operator in Vietnam.
Could you review some outstanding achievements of Saigontourist over the past time?
From an enterprise with only 236 workers, managing several small establishments and attracting a limited number of visitors and modest revenue annually, Saigontourist has now become one of the tourism sector’s leading enterprises. Currently, the company is operating over 100 affiliates including tourist agents, hotels, restaurants and resorts, with the team of workers exceeding 17,000 people. Annually, Saigontourist serves more than 2 million tourists, bringing in revenue of VND10 trillion and contributing over VND1 trillion to the state budget. For international cooperation, so far we have cooperated with about 300 partners from countries worldwide.
Not only contributing to push up the number of international arrivals to Vietnam, Saigontourist also supports important events of the country in general and Ho Chi Minh City in particular, joining hands to organize successfully the 22nd SEA Games, the 14th Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC 14), the 35th ASEAN-Japan Business Meeting (AJBM), the 3rd Asia Indoor Games and more. Especially, Saigontourist proposed to hold the Lunar New Year Flower Festival in 2004 and the event has been maintained up to now, contributing to add a periodic cultural festival to the southern city.
The most outstanding achievement of Saigontourist in the past 36 years is building and developing the brand Saigontourist which is more and more sustainable in both quality and quantity. By doing that, Saigontourist has increased the faith of domestic and foreign visitors as well as of partners and leaders, both central and local. We are proud of significantly contributing to the development and integration of Vietnam’s tourism sector in recent years.
Apart from efforts and investments for business, Saigontourist also pays special attention to social activities and welfare, considering it an expression of gratefulness to the community. Through the program “Saigontourist for the community,” we donate over VND8 billion for social and charitable activities annually in a bid to build a community of comfort and well-being.
Saigontourist has been official member of lots of international tourism organizations like PATA, ASTA, JATA and USTOA, and maintained cooperation relations with hundreds of travel agents from 30 countries. Could you tell us what Saigontourist’s advantages are compared to others?
The success of Saigontourist is attributed to many factors, mainly long-term and reasonable strategies, and our team of professional and dedicated workers. The challenges settled, the achievements gained and a chain of benefits to the community and to employees over the past time show the strategic vision, the belief and solidarity of all Saigontourist workers. This is the biggest difference and also the outstanding advantage of Saigontourist compared to other travel agents.
In order to realize this year’s planned targets, as well as stabilize the prices for services, what specific steps has Saigontourist outlined?
In first, we will recheck and cut unreasonable expenses to increase savings. Currently, the prices of most commodities are increasing, thus we will strive to valorise by saving consumption expenses while still ensuring the most quality services for customers under the motto of "the customer comes first, top quality.”
In addition, the company will focus on training a workforce skilled and good at foreign languages. Over the past 20 years, Saigontourist has trained 40,000 students specializing in tourism, restaurant and hotel, supplementing professional tourist workers for the sector. Besides training professional knowledge, taking care of labourer’s spiritual and material life is also among major points in the company’s development strategy.
In addition, Saigontourist is among enterprises taking the lead in raising the quality of services; building various tourist products, creating more new tours at reasonable prices. More importantly, in upcoming time we will increase investment in tourist infrastructure meeting international standards.
What strategies do you think Vietnam’s tourism needs for sustainable development, particularly in creating tours attractive to foreign visitors and competitive with international partners?
Vietnamese tourism has lots of advantages such as plentiful natural resources, a variety of tangible and intangible cultural heritages and particularly hospitable people. In my opinion, to take advantage of our potential as well as improve Vietnamese tourist products’ competitive capacity, the country should focus on exploiting and developing sea tourism, because not many countries can match our potential in this area. Moreover, Vietnam should comprehensively combine different types of tourism, from cultural tourism, sport tourism, MICE, and shopping tourism to waterway tourism. For tourism services, it is necessary to raise the quality as well as increase extra services. Especially, the sector should pay attention to the development of comprehensive infrastructure, a highly qualified workforce and professional marketing.
At the 44th annual ADB Meeting, what statement do you want to send to foreign partners as well as investors and tourist managers?
Ho Chi Minh City in particular and Vietnam in general has been among the leading choices of strategic investors. Ho Chi Minh City, the economic, financial and tourism centre of Vietnam, is an important gateway to penetrate not only the S-shaped country, but also the ASEAN market. For that reason, the investment cooperation between foreign enterprises and Vietnamese ones, including Saigontourist, will surely contribute to bring sustainable benefits for all parties.
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