VietNamNet Bridge – A paradox exists that tour fees have decreased sharply in the Tet high tourism season. However, the tour fee reductions still cannot help stimulate demand.

Domestic tour fee down by 40 percent

Instead of raising service fees and overcharging in the Tet sales season, service providers have all slashed service fees, thus allowing travel firms to slash tour fees to stimulate the demand.

Vietravel has offered the sharp tour fee reduction of up to 2.5 million dong per traveler for the Hanoi – Moc Chau plateau – Bai Dinh pagoda – Trang An – Ha Long Bay and Da Nang – Ba Na – Hoi An ancient town – Lang Co – Hue – Phong Nha cave, which will depart on December 29. Meanwhile, the one million dong reduction has been offered to the tours to the sea city of Nha Trang, Con Dao and Phu Quoc islands.

Hanoi Redtours, in taking full advantage of the 60 percent airfare decrease offered by Vietjet Air on the occasion of the opening of the direct air route to Da Lat, has decided to slash the fees for the tours to Phu Quoc island and Da Lat by 40 percent, applying it to the tours from December 2012 to March 2013.

Vietrantour is running two sales promotion campaigns for the two tours Hanoi – Phu Quoc Island and Hanoi – Da Lat, offering the tour fee reduction of 40 percent. Instead of making transit in HCM City, those travelers who choose the tour to Da Lat would stay at four-star instead of 3-star hotels as previously announced for normal programs.

Golden opportunities for Vietnamese to travel abroad

Vietrantours has affirmed that it has ideal outbound tours for the travelers who like going shopping abroad on Christmas season. Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia have been trying to attract travelers with the sales promotion campaigns with the sale off of up to 70 percent.

A four day tour to Hong Kong – Disneyland costs a traveler 15,310,000 dong, while the four day tour to Singapore 13,630,000 dong and to Malaysia 10,900,000 dong.

The clients of Vietrantours who choose the tour to Sydney – Canberra – Melbourne to “discover the Australian summer,” would have one more free tour day, while they only have to pay the unchanged fee of 69,900,000 dong. Meanwhile, a 12-day tour to the US costs 81,880,000 dong.

Booking outbound tours now is the right choice of many travelers, because foreign countries, in an effort to attract more travelers, are running very attractive sales promotion campaigns, offering the sale off of up to 50-70 percent, and launching a lot of colorful festivals.

Sales still slow

Travel firms all have admitted that despite the sharp tour fee reductions, the number of travelers booking tours remains modest. Some firms have even reported the 40-50 percent decreases in the number of travelers and revenue in comparison with the same period of the previous years.

Luong Duy Doanh, Deputy General Director of New Star Tours, also said the number of travelers has dropped by 40 percent, adding that this is the common problem of all travel firms.

Travel firms, which complained that they experienced a very difficult year 2012, said that they hope the business performance in the year-end and Tet travel season would be better to offset the bad performance in 2012.

A senior executive of Vietrantours said the tours have found 70 percent of clients, while the travel firm still expects more clients in some days.

Ha Yen