The meeting had the participation of Director General of VNAT Nguyen Van Tuan and representatives of functional departments under VNAT and 25 delegates from tourism agencies in ASEAN member countries and ASEAN Secretariat.

At the meeting, Director General Nguyen Van Tuan said that ASEAN is working toward its goal in building an ASEAN Economic Community in 2015, of which tourism cooperation is one of important tasks to contribute to implementing successfully the above goal. In recent years, ASEAN built and deployed a number of important strategies to promote and connect tourism programs among ASEAN countries such as ASEAN tourism development strategy 2011-2015; ASEAN tourism marketing strategy 2012-2015.

To concretize, ASEAN established Marketing and Communicating Group on ASEAN tourism (now Viet Nam is the leader of the group). The group is responsible for coordinating closely with ASEAN Tourism Product Development Group to enhance the effectiveness in building, promoting, connecting tourism brands in ASEAN, of which focuses on some decisive tourism forms such as eco-tourism, heritage-culture tourism, cruiser and river tourism, health tourism...

The special meeting on "ASEAN tourism marketing and product development" is an opportunity for ASEAN member countries to exchange and agree ideas to build tourism products with quality, brand and high competitiveness, bring ASEAN to become an attractive destination and on a level with other regions in the world.

Thu Giang