The Hanoi Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism sponsored a conference to kick off the city’s 2013 tourism promotion program. The department’s deputy director, Mai Tien Dung said that focusing on attracting Japanese visitors would be a major activity of the program. Hanoi set a target of increasing the number of Japanese visitors to the city by more than 20 percent per year.
The department will be encouraging travel businesses and hotels to join the 2013 tourism promotion program and help welcome press and tourism familiarization trips and international press delegations to the city.
The city will also work to attract domestic visitors, as this market segment has played an increasingly important role in tourism development in Hanoi in particular and Vietnam in general, Dung said. Hanoi’s tourism sector will stimulate domestic demand for tours during major holidays and events while encouraging tourism businesses, hotels, restaurants and entertainment and shopping centers to reduce service prices by 10-40 percent during the low season.
Apart from providing attractive promotions to attract domestic and foreign visitors, the city’s tourism sector is constructing new tourist offerings. It is assisting localities and businesses to survey and form typical tourist offerings of the Red River Delta while paving the way for artisans and skilled workers to create authentic souvenirs, and encouraging travel businesses to construct tourism products specifically designed for key markets so as each of this market can have at least one special promotion that is to be directly introduced to potential visitors.
The 2013 tourism promotion program is expected to help boost tourism development and attract more domestic and foreign visitors to Hanoi in the context of long lasting economic recession; the program’s success needs cooperation from tourism businesses, hotels, restaurants and carriers especially airlines, Dung said.
Dung said he believed that the program will make the most of opportunities and overcome the challenges and difficulties to combine tourism development with trade and service development, help boost sales of domestically made goods, and contribute to easing domestic economic difficulties, and assist the trade and service sectors to develop and promote sustainable tourism development.