attract 1 million tourists from Japan , its key market, by 2015.
The target was announced by Deputy General Director Hoang Thi Diep of
VNAT at a working session of the Vietnam-Japan Tourism Cooperation
Committee in Hanoi on November 11.
Diep,
co-chair of the session, the third of its kind so far, also made public a
target to turn Vietnam into a top-five favourite destination of
Japanese tourists.
To reach that end, the
hospitality watchdog plans to open a representative office in Japan ,
conduct market surveys and promote the national tourist potential
through international and Japanese mass media.
VNAT will also organise cultural tourist events in a number of Japanese
cities and arrange field trips into Vietnam for travel agents and
press people from Japan .
Maeda Ryuhei, General
Director of the Department of Planning and Policy Making under the
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, who co-chaired
the meeting, pledged willingness to cooperate with Vietnam in
strengthening the exchange of tourists between the two countries.
Maeda said the number of Japanese arrivals in Vietnam was limited
at 360,000 in 2009, making up just 2.4 percent of Japanese out-bound
tourists. Meanwhile, with merely 230,000 arrivals in Japan in the
first seven months of the year, Vietnamese tourists accounted for just
0.4 percent of international arrivals in the Cherry Blossom nation.
As a result, the two parties should promote the tourism campaign in
each others market, said the Japanese senior tourist expert.
High on the meeting’s agenda was bilateral cooperation in exchange of
tourists, investment in tourism and human resource development in the
hospitality industry.
The first and second
meetings took place in the French-styled mountain resort city of Da Lat
in the Central Highlands province of Lam Dong in 2005 and Tokyo ,
Japan in 2008.
Japan is among the top ten
markets of the Vietnamese tourism sector, with 355,000 arrivals in
Vietnam in the first 10 months of the year, representing a
year-on-year increase of over 22 percent. The figure is expected to
surpass 431,000 for the whole of 2010, reported VNAT./.
