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
Business & Investment Opportunities
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