Hung Yen Tourism: Potentials and Challenges

 

Hung Yen is famous for food specialties such as longan, lotus seeds, longan lotus seed tea, The Ky noodle, braised frogs, rice ketchup, sweet orange, and pancakes. The province is also home to many cottage industry villages like Dai Dong bronze casting village, Phu Ung silver sculpture village, fine-arts bamboo article, mattress weaving and embroidery villages. Hung Yen also has unique culture and arts like duet singing, cheo singing and ca tru singing.

 

However, as of end-2012, Hung Yen province had 167 accommodation facilities with approximately 1,962 rooms, including 22 hotels rated one - two stars with 521 rooms. In 2012, the tourism industry welcomed 218,450 visitors, up 17.5 per cent over 2011, of which international visitor arrivals reached 8,036, up 17 per cent against 2011. Total tourism revenue was estimated at nearly VND77,812 billion, up 16 per cent year on year.

 

Currently, the tourism revenue of Hung Yen is small as the province has not yet tapped available potentials, tourism products are not rich enough, tourism activities are yet promoted strongly enough, tourism infrastructure is undeveloped, tourism human resources are limited, and investment for tourism is small.

 

Mr Do Manh Hung, Deputy Director of the Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism of Hung Yen province, expressed his regret to see Hung Yen, the home of culture, struggling to develop tourism due to the severe shortage of infrastructure and personnel. Every year, Hung Yen has more than 400 traditional festivals. However, as spiritual and festival tourism is not developed in harmony with the other forms of tourism, they primarily welcome home-grown visitors who do not usually use services.

 

With the aim of making tourism a spearhead economic sector, attracting more tourists, raising tourism revenue, and increasing tourism contributions to the province’s GDP, Hung Yen has taken a number of measures to develop local tourism like expanding the tourism market with the participation of more economic sectors, boosting advertising programmes and the association of enterprises and provinces to develop joint tours and destinations to attract more tourists, mobilising domestic and foreign resources to build tourism infrastructure to be more attractive to tourists, enhancing State management over tourism, and developing tourism human resources.

 

In the coming time, Hung Yen will make its master plan for tourism development, aiming to build famous tourism product brands, connecting with other localities, especially Hanoi, to develop tourism products, including river tours. The province will focus on domestic tourists and boost advertisement to attract international visitors.