Authorities in Ho Chi Minh City have been implementing a range of measures to boost tourism, from improving the quality of services and increasing network linkages to offering attractive promotions.
HCM City – Viet Nam’s tourism hub - is the first city to effectively develop attractive tourism products through creating links with other localities.
Recently, the city diversified its products on offer in an attempt to draw in more visitors. In addition to HCM City’s well-known sights, the city is planning to develop a variety of interesting and affordable tours throughout the city.
A number of the tours on offer are organised in cooperation with other localities with a high potential for tourism development, such as Ben Tre, Tien Giang, Can Tho and Phu Quoc. These tours are extremely popular with domestic and foreign visitors.
The tours enable holiday-makers to gain insight into the cultures and daily lives of the local inhabitants through visiting historical sites and manufacturing sites for traditional crafts and goods.
The city has been working to develop the domestic tourism market through running promotions to encourage Vietnamese people to travel within the country. Concurrently, HCM City has also intensified promotional efforts abroad.
The city has identified a range of target tourism markets for the near future, including Northeast Asian and Southeast Asian nations, Western European nations, the US, Russia, India and the Middle East.
Along with the improvement of tourism products and infrastructure, the city is planning a series of cultural and sports events as well as promoting the programme “HCM City – 100 interesting facts”, which aims to further introduce the city’s sights and attractions to tourists.
The 10th International Travel Expo 2014 (ITE HCMC 2014) will take place in the city from September 11-13, which aims to promote the tourism industry in the Mekong Sub-region whilst also creating the opportunity for businesses to expand their markets further.
To diversify the types of tourism in anticipation of increasing numbers of tourists, the city developed a plan to boost waterway tourism from 2013-2015, and a vision for 2020. HCM City invested in the construction of five key routes for this type of tourism, whilst also upgrading and building ports and access roads to tourism sites throughout the city.
In the first five months of 2014, the city welcomed approximately 1.8 million international tourists, which marks a 9.7 percent rise compared to the same period in 2013.
The majority of visitors were from Japan, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and European countries.