More Connectivity to Uplift Central Coast - Central Highlands Tourism Brand

He said the tourism sector of Central Coast and Central Highlands provinces has made an impressive progress in recent years. Tourism is gradually becoming a key economic sector of each locality. However, this region has also confronted huge difficulties and challenges in tourism development, particularly traffic restraints, poor infrastructure, weak tourism companies, and ineffective policies.

 

Apart from restrictions in asynchronous economic and social infrastructure, technical facilities, overlapping tourism products from locality to locality, and inappropriate tourism promotion, the weakness of tourism development in the Central Coast - Central Highlands region is also attributed to feeble coherence and cooperation and the absence of the regional development strategy. According to Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam, tourism is an integrated economic sector with strong interconnectivity with other sectors and regions. The Central Coast - Central Highland region started to pay attention to inter-provincial and inter-regional cooperation but the effective was low.

 

The Central Coast - Central Highlands region has 14 provinces and cities. Each locality is endowed with particular advantages and potential for tourism development. In 2013, this region attracted 4.7 million international visitors and 22.1 million domestic tourists. This showed the importance of geographical location and the magnet of tourism resources to tourists. However, the region’s tourism revenue reached only VND30,000 billion in 2013, accounting for just 15 percent of the country’s total.

Therefore, in the coming time, to create momentums for tourism development in the Central Coast - Central Highlands region, Deputy Prime Minister Dam told concerned localities to deal with existing problems and encourage companies to strengthen tourism development cooperation. Moreover, he noted that localities need to review development plans to focus on their specific strengths, improve investment policies, accelerate tourism promotion, create new locally distinctive tourism products, and build a general brand name for the region’s tourism. Tourism associations were urged to play their roles in uniting tourism firms and controlling service quality.

 

According to tourism authorities, travellers are willing to pay more to use locally unique tourism products and enjoy better service quality. Therefore, a good cooperation among provinces in the Central Coast - Central Highlands will not only attract more tourists to the region but also uplift the tourism brand of Central Coast - Central Highlands in particular and of Vietnam in general on the international market.