The tourism industry is experiencing golden days

According to the chair of the Vietnam Tourism Association Nguyen Huu Tho, there were 1 million direct workers in the tourism industry in 2016. With the current growth rate, the figure is expected to reach 2.5 million by 2020.

Travel firms and hotels all complain that they need qualified workers and that recruited workers all need to be retrained. 

Sim Tran from Imperial Group said the newly opened hotels in Phu Quoc, Ba Ria – Vung Tau, Long Hai and Phuoc Hai have ordered 500-700 workers for different divisions, but The Imperial International Hotel School cannot find enough workers to provide.

Hundreds of hotels in Phu Quoc are seeking workers in large quantities, but they cannot recruit workers on the spot. Therefore, they have to seek human resources in Kien Giang, An Giang, Can Tho and Rach Gia and bring to Phu Quoc for training.

The supply of tour guides, according to Nguyen Van My, chair of Lua Viet Tour, is ‘seriously lacking’. In 2017, Vietnam received 13 million inbound and 7 million outbound tourists, while there were only 13,000 tour guides.

The same thing is occurring with domestic travel. It is estimated that there are 70 million domestic travelers each year, while there are less than 10,000 tour guides.

Tho, commenting about Vietnam tourism said there is great potential, said there are four big problems – the lack of professionalism, cooperation, and weak capability of using IT to attract travelers and the short supply of high-quality workers.

With the predicted growth rate of 25-35 percent per annum, Vietnam would need 2 million high-quality workers for tourism. 

Vingroup, FLC, Sun Group and other big real estate developers are building a series of 4-5-star hotels in Phu Quoc, Thanh Hoa and Phu Yen, which predicts a high demand for hotel workers in the near future. 

Tourism schools admit they cannot satisfy the demand at this time and in upcoming years.

A report of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) showed that the number of trained workers in the industry is 43 percent of total workers and more than half of them cannot speak a foreign language.

The productivity of Vietnam’s tourism and hotel sector is just equal to one-fifth of Singapore’s, one-tenth of Japan’s and one-fifth of Malaysia’s.

Analysts have noted a new wave of workers flocking to Vietnam from regional countries, including Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia. Most 4-5-star hotels in Vietnam have foreign staff.

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Kim Chi