Sep 10, 2011

Vietnam - Tourism officials should pay attention to detail


For years, local officials have expended considerable effort to promote Vietnam as an attractive tourism destination, announcing new tours, running commercials on international TV channels and so on. However, they seem to forget about the handiest tools in tourism promotion: guidebooks, which together with postcards and souvenirs, are among income sources that do not require high investment costs.

In fact, although the country attracts nearly five million international visitors each year, all the guidebooks currently available on Vietnam are released by foreign publishers.

According to local tour guides who take care of international tourist groups, all foreign-published guidebooks have practical information and are written in many foreign languages. With just one guidebook, tourists get information about all corners across Vietnam, its culture, history, cuisine and even contemporary social mores.

The famous Lonely Planet, for example, has been re-published ten times with updated information each time. Recently it has even published a book specifically for Ho Chi Minh City as well as a handbook on using basic Vietnamese in daily conversations.

Guidebooks written by Vietnamese and published locally are conspicuously absent.

“I only sell these books (Lonely Planet), no one has ever asked about Vietnamese guidebooks,” said a bookseller in Dong Khoi Street, located in downtown HCMC.

Furthermore, while foreign tourists can easily find free maps and brochures at international airports in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, they are nowhere to be found in Vietnam’s largest airport, the Tan Son Nhat airport in HCMC.

In 2007, the city’s Department of Culture, Sports, and Tourism announced plans to establish a kiosk providing free information for tourists. However, so far, foreign tourists still have to buy maps from stalls on the street.

A tourism kiosk in front of the city’s War Remnants Museum has long become storage facility for peddlers, while the one at the Saigon Tax Trade Center only provides information about hotels and restaurants.

Things are not much different in Hanoi, where local authorities built 40 kiosks in 2006, but soon after, their touch screens were damaged and the systems suffered from lack of maintenance.

Given increasing reports about tourists being harassed and/or cheated by taxi drivers, peddlers and thieves, foreign visitors need information centers that can tell them what to do and where to go when they face such situations.

In fact, the absence of such information centers is partly why local agencies are slow to react in helping tourists in need, according to Nguyen Huu Tho, chairman of HCMC Tourism Association.

Besides guidebooks, tourism websites in Vietnam also fail to provide necessary information for tourists.

Given the current state of development of tourism in Vietnam, overlooking guidebooks as trivial is not advisable.

Concerned authorities should remember that attention to detail pays off and is always appreciated. Without this approach, no promotion campaign can be successful, irrespective of the scale of the project or the investment involved.

By N.Tran Tam



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