Students urge VN tourism promotion shake-up
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How can Vietnam promote itself as a tourism destination? A group of students from Thang Long Marketing University suggest setting up a highly interactive and comprehensive website with a popular personality acting as a brand ambassador.
The Internet, much more ubiquitous but less expensive than traditional marketing channels, is a trendy, powerful, and effective way to introduce Vietnam’s tourism attractions to the world.
Countries like South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand have made their tourism websites attractive, informative, useful, and multilingual. Thailand’s website is in 34 languages.
Almost 3 million results pop up when you Google “Vietnam tourism” but it can be safely said not one website is efficient and attractive, even that of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism.
A sea change is desperately required. The website should focus more on photos and information of available packages, and have destinations categorized as “culture,” “history,” “cuisine,” and so on.
One of the most useful features for tourists is a hotline system to fully support their every demand. It will also help holidaymakers choose their destinations.
A tourism website has to be “intelligent” and diverse to suit every need.
To be precise, it should act as an online catalogue which allows visitors to browse for information and photos about destinations.
The photos should be categorized into topics like “sea travel,” “culture travel,” “history travel,” “seasons & holidays” and so on.
It is also essential to have an application like “Vietnam – Your itinerary,” providing visitors comprehensive information about destinations, leisure activities, and probable costs so that they can build their own itinerary.
Panorama, the latest technology for wide-angle photography, can be used for photographs. It allows photos to be of much wider scale than normal and very high resolution, providing visitors a detailed look at the destinations they wish to visit.
For young visitors, social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Flickr can be used.
They also enable updating of photos, video clips, and tourism events for visitors from around the world.
An additional benefit is that these channels provide a forum for visitors to share their comments, opinions, experiences, or even questions about tourism in Vietnam.
Such a fertile source of feedback from holidaymakers will also allow authorities to figure out their strategies and campaigns.
Hot idol to be the tourism representative
Following the economic recession and political crisis in 2009, the Tourism Authority of Thailand made a wise decision to sign up Nichkhun, the singer in the Korean boy band 2PM, to be its tourism ambassador.
Born in the US into a Thai family, Nichkhun finished high school in Thailand, and, at 21, can speak English, Thai, and Korean and is learning Chinese.
Nichkhun is a good choice to attract young tourists to Thailand since he is young, attractive, and well-known around Asia.
He appears in videos for the campaign “Come to Thailand; Let’s take a break” playing golf, eating lobsters, trying his hand at kick boxing, and taking part in the traditional Songkran festival.
It has yielded results for Thailand, enabling tourism to recover in 2010.
Similarly, Korean made the movie “An unforgettable day in Korea” featuring a number of superstars to popularize its attractions and delicious cuisine around the world.
Vietnam too can make use of all of the above strategies to boost its tourism.
It can look for a global personality to be its tourism ambassador. This person will feature in ads, videos, and coffee table books about Vietnamese tourism, and be the spokesperson for Vietnam at international tourism fairs and exhibitions.
The ambassador should be offered tours of destinations around Vietnam with his or her family and friends on occasions like birthdays and other anniversaries.
In return, Vietnam can use the representative’s images in all of its products to boost tourism.
But tourism authorities should have different representatives at different stages of the marketing campaign.
They should make movies about the country’s attractions and destinations and put them on Youtube and Facebook and offer them for free to visitors at international airports so that everyone can be an ambassador for Vietnamese tourism.
