Foreign tourists enjoy a cyclo ride on Ly Tu Trong Street in downtown HCMC. EuroCham recommends Vietnam ease visa procedures to make the country a more attractive destination for travelers.

EuroCham names more European Union member states, the United States, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan as among the markets that can potentially account for a significant tourism revenue share for Vietnam.

“Visa exemptions to these markets should generally be granted for stays of up to 30 days,” EuroCham suggests and adds that only passport holders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are currently visa exempted for stays of 30 days or less.

Vietnam has allowed passport holders from Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Japan, Korea and Russia to enter the country for a period of 15 days without a visa. But, EuroCham says most foreign tourists need to apply for a visa and that obtaining such visa for entry into Vietnam is a problem, sometimes because of insufficient information and time-consuming procedures.

“Overall, visa requirements remain a huge obstacle for travelers, in particular last-minute travelers… Due to visa requirements and unpredictable processing times, last minute travel to Vietnam is not an option and has been replaced by weekend trips to Phuket, Bali, Boracay, Macao and Singapore,” EuroCham explains.

EuroCham recommends the new markets to enjoy the visa favor when considering their spending capacity and the number of visitors to Vietnam. Of which, the U.S., Australia and Taiwan were in the list of top visitor-generating markets for Vietnam in 2009 when the country’s international arrivals fell some 11% to more than 3.7 million.

Figures of the tourism sector showed Vietnam attracted nearly 404,000 visitors from the U.S., more than 271,000 from Taiwan and over 218,000 from Australia in 2009, a year when the world’s tourism industry was hit hard by the global economic downturn.

The global economic downturn dealt a blow to Vietnam’s tourism industry in 2009, but EuroCham believes that the tourist sector will have great opportunities as the economy picks up.

Tourism is a US$4.5-billion industry in Vietnam, and EuroCham says this industry is employing around 10% of the labor force in the service sector, thus making tourism one of the country’s key employment industries.

EuroCham also wants an easy visa-on-arrival procedure system to be established like in Cambodia or Laos as this enables qualified passport holders to enter Vietnam for a period of at least seven days without any documentation other than their passport.

EuroCham believes that transparent and consistent visa-on-arrival procedures and policies will attract many last-minute expatriate business travelers in the region and ease logistics for tour operators and travel agencies.