Viet Nam’s tourism has stepped up eight places on the 2021 Tourism and Travel Development Index (TTDI), according to the World Economic Forum (WEF) Report.

Viet Nam experienced the greatest score improvement, rising by 4.7 per cent to leap from 60th to 52nd on the overall index. Indonesia and Saudi Arabia also had great improvements in rank, with an increase of 3.4 per cent to the 32nd place and 2.3 per cent to the 33rd place, respectively, the report said.

The WEF report shows that Viet Nam’s improved rankings have resulted from its achievements in COVID-19 prevention, measures of safe and flexible adaptation to the pandemic, and continuous efforts to develop safe tourism.

The report noted that relatively stagnant TTDI results reinforce the difficult situation the Travel and Tourism (T&T) sector faces. On average, TTDI scores increased by just 0.1 per cent between 2019 and 2021.

According to the report, aside from the United States (2nd), the top 10 scoring countries are high-income economies in Europe and Eurasia or Asia-Pacific regions.

Japan tops the ranking, with fellow regional economies Australia and Singapore coming in 7th and 9th, respectively. Meanwhile, Italy joined the top 10 (up from 12th in 2019) in 2021.

The remaining top 10 TTDI performers are Spain (3rd), France (4th), Germany (5th), Switzerland (6th) and the United Kingdom (8th).

The Asia-Pacific region is the second-highest performer in the ranking. Of its 20 constituent economies, 12 score above the TTDI average and 13 have improved their scores since 2019.

Many of the more developed economies in the region have world-class transport, tourism, healthcare and ICT infrastructure, high levels of international openness and investment in T&T, conducive business environments, high performance for socio-economic resilience and qualified and productive workforces.

On the other hand, the region’s less developed economies’ advantage in price competitiveness and rich natural assets are often offset by gaps in the aforementioned factors such as tourism, healthcare and ICT infrastructure, international openness and socio-economic resilience.

However, these gaps are being bridged somewhat as the Asia-Pacific region’s lower-middle-income economies have improved their performance, with particularly strong growth in areas such as ICT readiness.

The TTDI 2021 is an evolution of the 15-year-old Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI) series, according to the WEF. Over the past two years, the severe damage to the tourism sector due to the COVID-19 pandemic has completely changed its approach in that the forum changed the ranking of TTCI to TTDI.

The transformation of the TTCI into the TTDI reflects the index’s increased coverage of T&T development concepts, including sustainability and resilience impact, on T&T growth. It is designed to highlight the sector’s role in broader economic and social development as well as the need for T&T stakeholder collaboration to mitigate the impact of the pandemic, bolster the recovery and deal with future challenges and risks.

Covering a total of 117 economies, the TTDI ranking is based on the assessment of a set of tourism development capacity indexes which consists of five sub-indexes, focusing on evaluating the role of the tourism industry in broader economic and social development. — VNS