samedi 26 avril 2008

Revealing its hidden charm


Apr 24th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Tourism could do a lot of good if Vietnam handles it properly
IT IS not so long since Vietnam was a place to escape from at all costs, not one that people would pay to visit. However, like its industry, agriculture and diplomacy, its tourism is now firmly on the map. In the latest annual survey by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), it moved up from sixth to fourth place in the league table of the world's fastest-growing destinations. Last year it had 4.2m foreign visitors, 16% more than in 2006. After the backpackers and a few nostalgic American war veterans, tourists with fatter wallets are now arriving in large numbers.
A fair chunk of the foreign investment currently pouring into Vietnam is going into new hotels, resorts and golf courses, many aiming at the top end of the market. InterContinental, an American hotel operator, has just opened its first project in the country, an opulent waterside hotel on Hanoi's West Lake. Jon Nielsen, its general manager, says the firm has four other big projects under way and its development team is scouring the country for more. Rival international hotel companies such as France's Accor have similarly big plans. The expansion cannot come soon enough: the best hotels in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City can get booked up weeks in advance and room rates have soared.
You name it, we've got it

Along the central coast, from Danang's China Beach (a famous rest spot for American troops in the Vietnam war) down to the historic city of Hoi An, new beach resorts are rising from the sands. Besides endless stretches of as yet untouched beach, the country has a wealth of attractions for all tastes and pockets: the ruins of ancient civilisations such as the vanished Hindu Champa culture; quaint tribal villages with wooden stilt-houses, colourful festivals and craftwork; historic cities and churches from French colonial times; war sites like the Cu Chi tunnels and the grisly but informative museum on the site of the My Lai massacre; and enormous potential for ecotourism, with many new species still being discovered in the remote forested mountains.
Vietnam is fortunate in being surrounded by populous countries with rising spending power. China is the biggest source of visitors, sending over half a million of them last year. South Korea, Taiwan and Japan sent hundreds of thousands. The budget for the government's worldwide marketing campaign, “Vietnam: the Hidden Charm”, is tiny compared with the sums spent plugging “Amazing Thailand” and “Incredible India”. But Amir Girgis, the WTTC's South-East Asia analyst, is not worried: “In tourism, word of mouth is the strongest advertising.”
Vietnam's best bet, says Mr Girgis, is to concentrate its resources on “sustainability”—in particular, ensuring that the country's most picturesque sites are protected. This is already a worry, for example, on Mount Fansipan, Indochina's highest peak, where uncontrolled tourism is degrading the top of the mountain. The same is true in Hanoi, where the city authorities are battling to stop new housing and retail developments encroaching on historic buildings in the old quarter.
For a young country that needs to find jobs for over a million people joining the workforce each year, tourism is the perfect industry because it creates employment at all levels, from master chef to bottle-washer. Patrick Basset of Accor says his firm's 15 hotels in Vietnam already employ 3,000 people and he expects the staff to double in the next three years. The Vietnamese hunger for learning will be an asset: almost 95% of the staff that the InterContinental's Mr Nielsen recruited speak some English. In a previous assignment, in Bangkok, he was lucky to get 50%.
One often overlooked benefit of tourism is the boost it can give to exports. Many of the richer visitors to Vietnam come looking for contemporary art. Mr Nielsen expects to spend much of his time organising gallery tours for his guests. The great thing for small exporters is that their customers seek them out, pay on the spot and often make the shipping arrangements themselves.
Having discovered tourism's hidden charms, every town and province in Vietnam now wants a share. In rural Quang Ngai province the authorities are seeking hoteliers to develop its golden, palm-fringed and empty beaches, and dream of building spa resorts around the hot-water springs that bubble up through the province's rice paddies. Some developments sound rather ambitious, such as the film studio cum holiday village that is being planned for one of Quang Ngai's beaches. In Vietnam's false dawn of the mid-1990s, when investors rushed in, then out again as economic reform stalled, several giant tourism projects were abandoned. The same thing could happen again.
Vietnam's tourism may be booming, but its transport infrastructure is nowhere near ready for the onslaught. Ho Chi Minh City's new airport terminal has only just opened but is already close to capacity. Quang Ngai is a three-hour drive from the nearest airport along a dangerous single-lane highway. Partly because of poor transport, the World Economic Forum's latest travel and tourism competitiveness index ranks Vietnam a lowly 96th out of 130 countries. But if properly managed, the rush of tourists could provide the revenue for improvements to road, rail and air transport that would benefit the whole economy.

Aucun commentaire: