The increasingly high number of Vietnamese travelers going abroad year after year has helped Vietnam list its name into the list of the key markets of many countries, such as Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea.

Big marketing campaigns headed for Vietnam

A lot of tourism promotion institutions and foreign travel firms have recently organized big promotion campaigns on the Vietnamese market. In the period from mid November to early December of 2011, Patrick Kwok, Business Development General Director of the Hong Kong’s Tourism Agency paid two working visits to two big cities of Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi – to learn about business opportunities. The general director was accompanied by the representatives of a lot of Hong Kong’s hotels, travel firms and entertainment service providers.

Mr Kwok has revealed a plan on making a strong marketing campaign on the Vietnamese market within 12 months. Hong Kong’s businessmen would flow to Vietnam to discuss directly with Vietnamese travel firms, while tours to Hong Kong will be organized for travel agents and press agencies, and promotion programs will be designed to attract Vietnamese travelers. Especially, he said that Hong Kong tourism agency is considering establishing its representative office in Vietnam.

“102,000 Vietnamese people traveled to Hong Kong in 2010, an increase of 33.1 percent over 2009. We are now considering Vietnam as an important market,” he said.

Prior to that, Cambodia also organized a tourism promotion campaign in Vietnam. Not only setting up big stalls at tourism trade fair, the Cambodian Tourism Department also brought an art group with 100 artists to Vietnam who performed at the HCM City theatre.

The tourism promotion campaigns of South Korea in general and the Cheju island tourism promotion agency in particular were also implemented in a large scale. Meanwhile, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore have been considering Vietnam a key market for a long time.

As for Cambodia, Vietnam is the biggest tourism market from which 470,000 people traveled to Cambodia in 2010, while the figure is expected to increase to 550,000 this year.

Meanwhile, despite some problems, Thailand still can attract 452,000 Vietnamese travelers in the first 10 months of 2011, up by 44 percent over the same period of the last year. Especially, the percentage of Vietnamese travelers returning to Thailand for the second and subsequent time is very high at 68 percent.

Singapore and Malaysia have also reported the high number of Vietnamese travelers of up to hundreds of thousands of people a year.

Why can foreign travel firms attract Vietnamese travelers?

According to Vietnamese travel agencies, outbound tours can be sold well because they can bring benefits to both travelers and travel firms. Travelers can enjoy benefits because they can go to new excursion points or enjoy new services at the familiar excursion points, at reasonable costs. Meanwhile, travel firms can get benefits from the preferences offered by the foreign partners.

“People believe that Vietnamese travelers now like going abroad because of the low tour fees. But this is just one of the reasons,” said Cao Pham Hang, Director of SPSC Tour.

According to her, the main factor that makes outbound tours always attractive in the eyes of Vietnamese travelers is that the services are renewed all the time. Here in the foreign countries, there always exists a close cooperation among relating links of the tourism chain, which allows to create attractive programs and good service packages.

The tours to South Korea, for example, are always very attractive, even though the tour fees are very high. However, as the programs are renewed every season, the country still can attract Vietnamese travelers.