Travel agents are offering a flurry of domestic and outbound offerings for Ho Chi Minh City’s upcoming public holidays, Reunification Day on April 30 and Labour Day on May 1, with many of these tours already fully booked.
With travellers planning and purchasing their holidays early, most outbound tours to neighbouring countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand are already sold out for this year’s five-day holiday stretch.
As for the inbound market, agencies have come up with packages to new tourist spots like Tà Đùng in Đắk Nông and Bình Liêu in Quảng Ninh Province. Prices of domestic tours typically shoot up seven- to 10% during the holiday season.
This is in line with prime minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc’s April 12 speech at the Việt Nam Tourism Forum on Human Resources, where he stressed the need to train up tourism staff, develop new strategies and infrastructure – so as to eventually anchor tourism as Vietnam’s key contributor by 2020.
Referring to their population of 100 million, the prime minister also called for agencies and local authorities to support tour guides and develop community-based tourism, since locals already have a good sense of native life and culture.
Currently, the city has 5,400 tour guides, where 63 educational establishments are in place to train over 3,000 people in the tourism sector. However, HCMC still faces challenges such as a shortage of guides who are fluent in other languages including Thai, Korean or German, thus limiting tourist intakes from those countries.