Vietnam closes in on 2018 target

HANOI, 9 November 2018: International visitors to Vietnam during October registered 1,205,157 arrivals up 17.6% when compared with the same month in 2017.

However, when compared with the performance in September tourist arrivals suffered a slight decline of 0.6%.

October’s performance dipped in some major markets in Asia; China down 8.6%, Japan down 22.7% and Russia down 2%. Notable exceptions were Taiwan up 4.6% and Korea up 9.4%.

For the 10 months, January to October, tourist arrivals showed a robust growth of 22.4% on 12,821,647 arrivals, based on provisional figures released by the Government Statistics Office.

It is now highly likely that the country will achieve its year-end target of 15.5 million visits.

Asia was the major source of travel with 9,989,507 visits up by 26.5% driven by four core country markets, China, Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

Take these four giants outs of the equation and the next major markets are long haul USA and Russia.

The top five markets remain constant throughout the 10 months, January to October, led by China with a massive 4,280,756 visits up by 28.8%.

Korea was second with 2,867,380 up 14.3%, Japan third with 683,955 up 3.9%, Taiwan fourth with 588,804 up 14.8% and the USA with 576,493 up 13.9%.

Like all Southeast Asian nations tourism is dominated by Chinese arrivals and if that market suffered a hiccup it would spell disaster for a host destination. The challenge is to move promotions and heavy-duty sales campaigns into a wider sphere of markets that could in the long-term create a more sustainable balance, or compensate with higher yield.

Vietnam needs to do better in traditional European tourism generating markets as even the top producers such as the UK (248,000), France (231,025) and Germany (171,557) have considerably more potential than the performance indicates.

Source: GSO