Visa and Tourism Advisory Board join forces to attract international visitors to Vietnam

Visa and Tourism Advisory Board join forces to attract international visitors to Vietnam

On December 9, Visa, the world’s leader in digital payments, and the Vietnam Tourism Advisory Board (TAB), signed an MoU to work together to encourage more tourists to visit Vietnam, as well as improve the traveling experience while they’re here.

Vietnam is one of the top ten fastest growing tourism markets in the world, with the country seeing VND637 trillion gross revenue from the industry in 2018 alone. Despite this, the industry faces some major challenges, such as underdeveloped infrastructure, human resourcing and skills issues, and strong competition from neighbouring tourist destinations. While Vietnam has been rapidly expanding its acceptance of electronic payments, there are still many popular tourist establishments country-wide where travelers can only pay with cash.

Dang Tuyet Dung, Visa country manager for Vietnam and Laos said, “We’re very happy to be working with the Vietnam Tourism Advisory Board on this project to increase visitation to Vietnam and help bolster tourism revenues for the country. By sharing insights on international visitor spending behaviors across their travel journey in Vietnam, the company hopes to assist TAB in developing an even more targeted approach to growing the tourism industry.”

“In order to Vietnam to maximise tourist expenditure moving forward, it’s incredibly important that we have the right payment infrastructure in place, especially at frequently visited locations such as hotels, restaurants, tour operators, or night markets. Optimising communications network of Visa global footprint to increase tourists’ awareness of the tourism services in Vietnam will help TAB to be more proactive in capturing the inbound tourism flows,” Dung said.

Visa and Tourism Advisory Board join forces to attract international visitors to Vietnam

According to research conducted by Visa, more than 280 million households will be travelling internationally by 2025 and about two in five of these will be households in the Asia Pacific region. Many tourists have healthy travel budgets to spend while they’re enjoying their holidays, but at the same time, they don’t want to carry the necessary amount of local currency in order to do so.

Tran Trong Kien, chairman of the Vietnam Tourism Advisory Board, said, “We are a group of leading industry stakeholders committed to supporting the sustainable development of tourism in Vietnam as well as the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT). Apart from providing advices to tourism related policies, we work closely with our local and international partners to help promoting Vietnam through multiple platforms.”

In working together to promote Vietnam’s major tourist drawcards, such as its countless scenic locales, culinary experiences, and its historical and cultural sites, Visa will work to draw more inbound tourists through incentives for cardholders such as offers on accommodation, privileged access to events, and special dining deals.

Visa will also seek to provide tourism operators with data on national and international tourism spending, helping these businesses to make more informed decisions about how they can increase their revenues from travellers.