Pull Strengthened with Typical Tourism Products
Being a major centre of economy, culture, education, training, science and technology of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City is a converging place of great cultural, natural and human factors. This tremendous potential is synergised with well-planned tourism development strategies. Professionally deployed tourism promotion and advertisement has made Ho Chi Minh City a top destination for domestic and international tourists.
Set up over 300 years ago, Ho Chi Minh City keeps many cultural, humanistic and historical values crystallised and sublimated from the interchange of different cultures on the basis of Vietnamese typical cultural identity like urban tourism, ecological tourism and recreational tourism such as Can Gio Mangrove Biosphere Reserve and MICE tourism.
Especially, the city holds great advantage in tourism thanks to rich tangible and intangible cultural values such as historical relics, the War Remnants Museum, the Museum of History in Ho Chi Minh City, architectural works backdated 100 years like Chinese and Vietnamese mix-styled pagodas like Giac Lam Pagoda, Vinh Nghiem Pagoda, Ba Thien Hau Pagoda; trade centres and exciting culinary destinations; industrial parks, export processing zones, and high-tech parks; night markets; retail networks and supermarkets.
In recent years, the familiar names have made the city more attractive to tourists such as Ho Chi Minh City Post Office, Notre Dame Cathedral, Reunification Palace, Nha Rong Wharf and Ben Thanh Market. In addition, Ho Chi Minh City is home to most international and domestic travel agencies such as Saigontourist, Peace Tour, Vietravel and Benthanh Tourist and is a place where tourists arrive first before going to other regions of the south and the rest of the country. Especially, with a convenient and complete traffic infrastructure system, Ho Chi Minh City is also a centre of high-grade leisure and entertainment facilities in the country. This is the favourable condition for the city to develop unique tourism products, centres and resorts.
By promoting its available potential and advantages, Ho Chi Minh City has quickly become the most dynamically developing city and one of the leading localities in the country in developing special, diversified, professional tourism services in the past years. In 2016, Ho Chi Minh City was a bright spot on the blur picture of Vietnamese tourism industry. In the past year, total international tourist arrivals to the city reached 5.2 million, up 10 per cent from 2015 and domestic tourist arrivals totalled 21.8 million, up 10 per cent year on year. Tourism contributed 10 per cent to the city’s GDP growth, thereby positively helping the city’s economic restructuring.
In 2017, the city expected to welcome 6 million international visitors and 25 million domestic tourists, earning total revenue of VND116 trillion. To realise these targets, the city’s tourism industry will focus on developing more “responsible tourism” products tied to its inherently strong tourism products such as MICE tourism, waterway tourism, countryside discovery tourism, gastronomic tourism, recreational tourism, street arts performances and modern and classical arts performances.
Apart from annual events such as Aodai Festival, Tourism Festival, Dragon Dance Festival, Southern Fruit Festival, Southern Food Festival and International Travel Mart, Ho Chi Minh City’s tourism will organise many events and activities to promote the image of Ho Chi Minh City at international tourism events. In addition, the tourism industry will focus on standardising and improving tourism communication system, building tourism database for tourism promotion, building a standard set of tourism information for guides and visitors, standardising destination system introduction on the digital platform, providing destination information in many languages to create favourable conditions for tourists.
In particular, Ho Chi Minh City will also invest in product innovation and diversification, open two pedestrian streets in Bui Vien and Bach Dang areas, and open tours to wholesale markets to draw international visitors. Mr Bui Ta Hoang Vu, Director of Ho Chi Minh City Department of Tourism, said, tourism products are still a weak point of the city’s tourism industry. Its tourism resources are extremely diverse and special but crystallising these resources into unique tourist products requires close cooperation and coordination of the city government and tourism businesses, especially in tour operation. “Only by having unique and attractive tourist products, will the city be able to bring novel and exciting experiences to visitors when they are in the city – a place ranked second in the CMI rankings on 10 most dynamic cities in the world recently announced at the World Economic Forum 2017 in Davos, Switzerland,” Vu stressed.
Gia Phuc
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