A tour guide and visitors at the Sun World Ba Na Hills tourist area. Photo: Thu Ha

Specific promotion for each market

According to statistics from the Da Nang Department of Tourism, as of April 2024, the number of South Korean visitors to Da Nang took the lead with 636,964, accounting for 41.3% of the total declared number of international visitors. There were 47,508 Japanese visitors, accounting for 3.3% of the total and taking a berth in Da Nang’s top 10 international tourist source markets. Visitors from European markets accounted for about 8.9%. Those from Australia accounted for about 3%, about 1.6 times higher than the same period in 2023. Visitors from the American market made up for about 0.7%. Those from the Indian market accounts for about 4%, an increase of about 1.7 times over the same period in 2023.

However, according to a representative of the Da Nang Department of Tourism, although the tourist markets coming to Da Nang are quite diverse, currently there are no direct flights connecting Da Nang with European countries, Australia, the United States, Middle East and Central Asia. In addition to direct flights from Ha Noi, Ho Chi Minh City or Nha Trang (only for flights from Russia), visitors to Da Nang all transit at international airports in such other countries as South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong (China).

According to Ms. Mai Thi Thanh Hai, the Deputy Director of the Da Nang Tourism Promotion Centre, in an effort to attract even more tourist markets, the city's tourism industry has developed a tourism promotion plan for each specific market.

For example, with the European, American, and Australian markets, the target segment is aimed at overseas Vietnamese returning to Viet Nam to visit relatives, middle-aged and elderly visitors, married couples, and those who take trips on cultural, beach resort, golf and health care tourism. As for Indian market, focus is placed on individual and group travellers, MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions) and wedding tourists.

Each market has a promotion plan through participating in introducing destinations at major tourism fairs such as OTM fair in Mumbai; SATTE fair in Delhi; Business MICE and Luxury Travel Mart Delhi (India); the IMEX Las Vegas (USA) Fair booth in Ho Chi Minh City in October 2024; along with tourism promotion programmes in Sydney; connecting with diplomatic agencies and businesses in Sydney, Gold Coast (Australia, late July); cooperating with international travel agencies and cruise lines to promote the attractiveness of the destination, integrating destination programmes with tour programmes offered in the Australian market; welcoming famtrip groups to Da Nang to survey services, through media channels, social networking platforms.

Enhance human resource quality

Along with expanding the tourist market, tourism workers believe that the city's tourism industry needs to pay more attention to the quality of human resources in the tourism industry, especially those serving new tourist source markets. The Da Nang Department of Tourism has to date issued 4,116 international tour guide cards, including 177 Japanese; 303 South Korean, 1,938 English, 176 French, 69 Russian and 67 German tour guides.

As one of the businesses specialising in the European market, Mr. Huynh Van Minh, the Director of the Da Nang Branch of Asian Trail Travel Company, shared that Da Nang has strengths in MICE tourism, chosen by many tourists as a place to organise large, crowded MICE events.

However, the current difficulty is the human resources to serve these markets, especially such countries as Germany, Italy and Spain. If the number of tourists is too large, finding a tour guide at the same time is very difficult.

Not to mention, as for some other rare language markets such as German, proficient tour guides are now older and no longer guide groups, leading to a shortage, or for the Spanish market, the number of tour guides is also very limited.

Therefore, for long-term development, it is necessary to quickly train the next team of tour guides to serve the cited  growing markets. At the same time, it is also a need to provide additional professional training for human resources doing professional work such as tour consultants and drivers so that they can have the most professional skills.

Sharing the same opinion, Ms. Bao Ly, representative of Viet Nam Travelmart Joint Stock Company, said that due to the increasing demand and diversified tastes of customers, the market for rare famous customers is in short supply, so we need to pay attention to supplementing this human resources team as well as the quality of skilled personnel and expertise in exploiting visitors from international markets.

Director of the Da Nang Department of Tourism Truong Thi Hong Hanh acknowledged that, in response to the actual needs of customers, tourism businesses need to orient their target customers to proactively set up a team of human resources and workers from human resources in the hotel to tour consultants, drivers and guides.

The tour guide team plays a very important role because this is the first person visitors meet during the trip and serves as a bridge in promoting and preserving the destination's image. Therefore, to enhance the quality of tour guides, Da Nang will coordinate with Vietravel Company to pilot a voluntary star rating programme for tour guides, thereby encouraging them to hone their professional skills to meet the increasing needs of tourists.

Reporting by Thu Ha - Translating by A.Thu