Tourist magnet: Tourists enjoying the sights at Ponagar Temple in the coastal resort town of Nha Trang. — Bloomberg
NEARLY 597,000 foreigners visited Vietnam in November, an increase of 23.2% month-on-month and 39.7 times the number of last November.Vietnam’s tourism reopening began in earnest with the resumption of international flights in the middle of March this year.
According to the General Statistics Office (GSO), in the first 11 months of this year, more than 2.95 million international visitors arrived in Vietnam.
The total figure is 21.1 times higher than that of the same period last year, but down 81.9% compared with 2019, before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and still falls short of the 2022 target of five million foreign arrivals.
The number of international tourists travelling to Vietnam by air accounts for 88.9%; 11.1% came by road, and 0.03% by sea.
The majority of tourists, 2.076 million, came from other Asian countries, up 17.5 times compared to the first 11 months of last year.
European visitors numbered 415,600 (up 29.8 times); 323,400 came from the Americas (up 67.1 times); 129,700 from Oceania (up 115.7 times), and 9,500 from Africa (up 7.4 times).
The country is estimated to have taken 536.3 trillion dong (RM97bil) from accommodation and catering services, up 56.5% year-on-year.
Tourism authorities earlier this year set out a target of welcoming five million foreign visitors in 2022.
In 2019,Vietnam’s tourism industry served more than 18 million international visitors and 85 million domestic tourists.
However, in 2021, international visitors to Vietnam only reached 157,300, and the number of domestic tourists was only 40 million. — Vietnam News/ANN
