Nguyen Manh Cuong, Deputy Director of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT), told a review meeting in Hanoi that the domestic tourism segment fared quite well despite big challenges from the international economic downturn. Owing to the promotion program, a huge number of local travelers have made trips to many destinations such as Binh Thuan, Nha Trang, Danang, especially between March and October.

“The average occupancy rate of hotels in the central region shot up to as high as 90% in the summer,” he told the meeting in Hanoi.

The program was launched by VNAT in January of last year, offering big discounts of between 30% and 50% for visitors buying package tours with travel agencies who registered to join the program, as well as other promotions for travelers.

Cuong put the number of local travelers last year at 25 million, a hefty increase of 20% year-on-year. Of them, over 21,000 people have received discounted air tickets from the program to travel last year while many others have received other promotional services.

Vu The Binh, Director of the Department of Travel under VNAT, said that the strong growth of the domestic sector brought about a strategic change to Vietnam’s tourism. VNAT will now see the domestic travel segment as the base for tourism development, and will continue to speed up the growth of the sector and to encourage more local people to travel, he said.

Binh said the country’s tourism would carry out new promotion programs to local and international tourists but on a smaller scale compared to Impressive Vietnam. Such promotions will be tailored to meet diverse demands of tourists.

Events to celebrate 1,000 years of Thang Long-Hanoi will become good opportunities for the tourism sector to launch big promotions to tourists.

VNAT also said the Impressive Vietnam program failed to impact on international travelers on a positive way, as the number of international arrivals dropped 10.9% year-on-year to 3.87 million.