Tourists, or not tourists - that is the question
Print 
Thanh Nien newspaper in its January 8, 2011 print edition said the total number of international tourists to Vietnam last year stood at around 3.1 million, rather than the ambiguous 5-million figure, a record 34.8% increase over the year before.
In categorizing the number of international visitors to Vietnam by purposes of the trip, the tourism administration revealed that in 2010 there were 3.1 million international arrivals for tourism, 1 million coming on business trips, approximately 600,000 getting in for family visiting, and the remaining for other purposes.
Instead of saying the nation welcomed 3.1 million international tourists last year, VNAT has grossed the number and, inadvertently or not, misled the public by saying there were around 5 million ‘international arrivals’ to Vietnam in 2010.
In Vietnamese, ‘international arrivals’ (khách quốc tế) can easily be mistaken for ‘international tourists’ (du khách quốc tế). While the former means foreigners coming into a country for a variety of purposes, including family visiting, trading, investment, and possibly tourism, the latter refers to foreign visitors coming in for sheer vacation.
There is a basic difference between the two: how they spend money.
An investor comes to Ho Chi Minh City mainly for his or her business and normally spends a very short time doing some shopping or going sight-seeing. A businessman, similarly, just drops by a place and leaves it very quickly due to his limited time. They rarely use any tourist services.
Tourists, on the other hand, come to a place for just one purpose: tourism, i.e. for leisure and recreation.
Vietnam’s tourist industry should therefore be clear about its statistics, says Nguyen Van My, director of local tourist agency Lua Viet Tours.
We should differentiate between visitors arriving for tourism and for other purposes in order to properly assess the industry’s capacity, Tran Thuy Linh, an industry expert, says.
But La Quoc Khanh – deputy director of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Culture, Sports, and Tourism – admits there has been as yet no analysis of the record of those who come to the country's southern hub just for tourism purposes.
The ambiguity in the long run can hurt the country’s industry since tourist agencies will count on those misleading statistics to plan their business, Thanh Nien concludes.
