Before the Covid-19 outbreak, Sun World Ba Na Hills Da Nang received 5 million travelers a year, and 55 percent of them were foreign travelers. On the 2023 Tet holiday (January), tourists reached only 60 percent of the number last year during Tet.

Similarly, on Phu Quoc Island (Kien Giang), the number of travelers was just 60 percent of the previous year's holiday.

Meanwhile, Sun World Ha Long in Quang Ninh had a quiet 2023 Tet holiday with the number of visitors just 50 percent of the same period last year. 

Many hotels turned off the lights, while parks closed their doors because there were not enough visitors. Sun World had once received more than 10 million visitors a year.

“These figures really cause us headaches,” said Tran Nguyen, deputy CEO of Sun World, of the Sun Group, at a workshop on tourism held on March 9.

Trinh Ngoc Thanh from Vietnam Airlines said the total number of foreign travelers to Vietnam in 2022 was just 28 percent of 2019. In the first two months of 2023, the figure was just 64 percent of the number in the same period in 2019. 

While Singapore and Thailand have recovered 100 percent of their tourism and have even seen growth over 2019 figures, Vietnam’s tourism remains stagnant.

“The tourism sector as a whole at this moment remains bad,” said Luong Hoai Nam, a member of the Tourism Advisory Board (TAB). 

Before the Covid-19 outbreak, the number of foreign travelers to Vietnam was just half of Thailand’s. According to Nam, Vietnam began reopening tourism earlier than other countries with a hope of narrowing the gap between Vietnam and other regional countries. 

But travelers to Vietnam have dropped to one-third of Thailand's, while the figure may be just one-fourth in 2023.

Nam said the current situation has caused thousands of enterprises to incur big losses, and many hotels have been put up for sale to pay debts. 

The national flag air carrier Vietnam Airlines has reported an accumulated loss of VND34 trillion and minus stockholder equity of VND10 trillion. Bamboo Airways has had a loss of VND16.7 trillion, and Vietjet has for the first time reported a loss of VND2.4 trillion after 10 years of making a profit.

Foreign lenders have seized the airplanes of some air carriers to collect debts. If this happens to many airlines, this will create a domino effect, a danger for Vietnam’s aviation industry, according to Nam.

Nguyen Quoc Ky, chair of Vietravel, said Cambodia plans to attract 8 million foreign travelers in 2023 as does Vietnam. 

While Thailand has set the ambitious goal of receiving 30 million travelers, Vietnam has set a modest goal of increasing the number of foreign travelers from 5 million to 8 million.

According to Ky, the factors that most attract tourists include national tourism brands; tourism products; tour fees; and visa policy.

He said the visa policy needs to be open to more countries with an expanded length of stay. 

Vietnam could take full advantage of the visa policy to promote tourism recovery. For example, after 15 days, visas can be automatically extended for travelers.

Ky pointed out that the connections among the links of the Vietnamese service system are poor. All enterprises want to provide services and sell their products from A to Z, rather than cooperate and share profits with each other.

Meanwhile, Thailand can provide tours at very low fees, so they are very competitive.

If travel firms sell tours at high prices, they won’t be able to attract tourists amid high inflation and people practicing thrift.

Duong Anh Duc, HCM City Vice Mayor, noted that travel firms should not totally blame macro policies, but need to reconsider their own policies, especially connections among them. 

They should not think about how much each travel firm pockets from travelers, but ‘think big’ about how much foreign travelers will spend in Vietnam.

A representative from Vietnam Airlines said that all advertisements, sale promotions and marketing activities in foreign markets need to be implemented 6-8 months in advance. 

Meanwhile, the air carrier still has not received any report about plans to attend exhibitions and tourism promotion fairs in 2023 from the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT).