~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

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Vietnam sends mission to Russia to woo more visitors

HO CHI MINH CITY - A delegation of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) officials and business yesterday left for Russia to join two travel fairs there and organize tourism promotion activities in the potential market. The group, led by VNAT’s head Hoang Tuan Anh, will attend the Intour Market 2007 from March 18 to 21 and MIIT Mosow from March 21-24. This annual gathering attracts around 120,000 tour buyers from across Russia and other companies from 110 countries and territories.

This is the biggest promotion program by Vietnam’s tourism authority in Russia, with an aim to attract more Russian guests into Vietnam as Russia is considered a highly-potential source market for Vietnam’s hospitality industry. Only 28,800 Russians visited Vietnam last year out of the total 3.6 million international arrivals, travel firms and hotels have seen Russia as a potential market and have been speeding up promotion programs in Russia. Local tour operators said the arrivals of many moneyed tourists from Russia since late 2005 on chartered planes had signaled the start of an increasing influx of Russian visitors to Vietnam, just like the beginning of a boom in the number of Japanese tourists years earlier.

Despite the small number, Russian arrivals last year still showed a year-on-year increase of 15%, and arrivals from this market in the first two months of this year already exceeded 10,100 guests, up 31.7% year-on-year. Andrey Ur. Sidorov, chairman of City Administration, Vladivostok Committee for Foreign Economic Relations and Tourism, who had traveled to Vietnam five times, told the Daily on the sideline of a meeting last year that Vietnam lacks activities to promote the country’s image in Russia. He said that many Russian people were traveling to Thailand, but most of them did not know about Vietnam, he said.

By Doa Loan - Saigon Times Daily - March 15, 2007.