VietNamNet Bridge - Tourism companies with fake names of well-known travel companies are causing misunderstandings among customers. 

Nguyen Van My, chair of Lua Viet Tour, said that it was easy to counterfeit products in the tourism sector.

My said a client booked a tour to the central region via Lua Viet branch in Nam Dinh province but Lua Viet does not have any branch in Nam Dinh and the firm had not organized tours to the central region at that time.

Later, he found out that there was a travel firm with a name similar to his company’s name – Hanh Trinh Lua Viet with the headquarters in Nam Dinh b

“We were very frustrated because the brand name ‘Lua Viet’ which we have been building over many years was copief. But when we complained about this, Hanh Trinh Lua Viet showed us a license for operation granted by the Nam Dinh Planning & Investment Department,” he said.
 
Meanwhile, Tran Bao Thu, marketing director of Fiditour, complained that the company’s website in design and content is often copied, from tour design to customer care programs.

According to Thu, the copycats are mostly small tourism companies which don’t have strong brands in the market. 

Tourism companies with fake names of well-known travel companies are causing misunderstandings among customers.

“Fiditour worked with counterfeiting tourism companies, but the problem still cannot be solved,” she said. “The current regulations and the policy to protect businesses are not clear enough."

Tran Van Long, CEO of Du Lich Viet, said that when searching on Google and typing the names ‘Saigontourist’, ‘Vietravel’ and ‘Du Lich Viet’, the website showed links to little known small tourism firms at the top of the page. 

“Authentic firms, in order to fight the ‘dirty’ firms, have to spend money to buy advertisements,” he said.

Pham Trung Luong, former deputy head of the Research Institute for Tourism Development, said the counterfeiting in the tourism sector has existed for a long time. 

However, state management agencies have not taken any actions to stop the problem. As a result, authentic firms have to live together with ‘dirty’ firms.

Lawyer Nguyen Van Hau commented that ‘dirty’ travel firms can have illicit business because of legal loopholes. The Enterprise Law and Decree No 43 stipulate that two travel firms are considered as having the same name only if all the components of the names are exactly the same.

As a result, newly set up businesses just add one or two words to be able to get business certificates.

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