With its affirmed tourism brand, the friendly image of Ho Chi Minh City has become increasingly known to more and more domestic and foreign tourists. To maintain sustainable and efficient development, its tourism industry is focusing on building and completing products, meeting tourists’ more and more varied demands.
Ho Chi Minh City is among the leading cities in tourist attraction. In 2010, Ho Chi Minh City received 3.1 billion international tourists, increasing by 20 percent against 2009 and 111 percent of the initial plan; gaining turnover of VND41 trillion, up 17 percent over 2009 and 103 percent of the initial plan.
With increasing numbers of tourists, especially international ones, coming to the city, there are many opportunities and challenges for the city to maintain sustainable development in tourism. In 2011, Ho Chi Minh City targets to beat the plan of attracting about 3.5 international tourists (increasing by 11 percent), bringing turnover of VND 49,000 billion (increasing by 20 percent). According to Ms Nguyen Thi Hong, Deputy Chairwoman of the City People’s Committee and Head of Ho Chi Minh City Tourism Management Board, to reach the above targets in 2011, Ho Chi Minh City’s tourism industry will take actions to both meet the various demands of tourists and to increase the number of tourists coming to the city. Particularly, tourism industry concentrates on improving the quality of communication activities towards socialization. Accordingly, trips to promote tourism abroad will be built on specific plans with partners; at the same time, there will be intensified governmental management on tourism in the direction of combining with districts and supporting enterprises. 2011 will witness the economy’s deeper integration into the world; therefore the tourism industry will together with others and districts build and hold tourism events such as: expand standard tourism programmes; implement for the 2nd time the programme of Ho Chi Minh City – 100 amazing facts to increase the attraction of the destination, lengthen accommodation time and increase tourists’ spending. Besides going hand in hand with key and potential markets, the communication activities also focus on domestically communicating abroad via farm trips for tourism agencies – international journalists; coordinating with domestic cities and provinces as well as regional countries. In 2011, the city will hold about 27 events to communicate tourism, in which five will be held abroad including: participating in ASEAN Tourism Forum in Cambodia, Finland MATKA Tourism Travex, Travex on Conference Tourism AIME in Australia, and road shows in Northern Europe and Cambodia.
In addition, tourism industry also pays attention to holding festival events in the city to stimulate domestic tourism demand, drawing more tourists to the city, such as: Flower Festival in Nguyen Hue Street, Tourism Festival, Mekong Delta Fruit Festival, Southern Cuisine Festival, and Countries’ Specialty Festival; communicating the destinations’ images and creating opportunities for domestic enterprises to meet, associate and offer their products to foreign ones. Continue to call for improving quality of local tourism products and services by choosing and praising the top services in Ho Chi Minh City’s tourism to advertise and communicate to domestic and foreign tourists. At the same time, maintaining and improving the quality of existing tourism products and gradually put into action new packages and tours. Foster development of potential tourism types with policies encouraging tourism development, improving services’ quality, building up highly competitive brand, making tourism the key economic industry.
Besides, in 2011, the City’s tourism will concentrate on developing new tourism products, which is considered the core of tourist attraction. According to Mr Nguyen Duc Tri – Deputy Director of Office of Travel – Ho Chi Minh City’s Department of Culture – Sports – Tourism, for years, Ho Chi Minh City has had amazing city tours and destinations. Given the advantages of diversified rivers and canals, the city is aiming to develop river tours – a favourable tourism product. “This is a great potential suiting the development direction of the City People’s Committee as currently, to minimize traffic congestion, the city plans to open ‘Bus’ boat routes on rivers,” added Mr Tri. In addition to holding conference on river travel, in 2011, the city will push up some short or long term products on river; foster river travel mainly in the city in two directions: from the city centre to Can Gio and Artist Village (District 2).
Not only paying attention to river travel development, the industry will strengthen training activities for human resources to improve professionalism of governmental staff on tourism, business management and labourers; equip knowledge and skills in the direction of standardization for tourism human resources, focus on small and medium enterprises, and specific professions such as reception, housekeeping and tour guides.
Thanh Tan
Vietnamese
