Visa Vietnam and the Vietnam Tourism Advisory Board (TAB) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to work together to encourage more tourists to visit Việt Nam and improve their traveling experience in the country.

In promoting Viet Nam’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 accommodations, privileged access to events, and special dining deals.

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

Viet Nam is one of the top 10 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 major challenges such as underdeveloped infrastructure, human resource and skills issues, and strong competition from neighboring tourist destinations.

While Viet Nam has been rapidly expanding its acceptance of electronic payments, there are still many popular tourist establishments countrywide where travelers can only pay with cash.

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

"In order for Viet Nam to maximise tourist expenditures 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 the communications network of Visa's global footprint to increase tourists’ awareness of tourism services in Viet Nam will help TAB to be more proactive in capturing inbound tourism flows.”

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 Viet Nam Tourism Advisory Board, said: “The Viet Nam Tourism Advisory Board is a group of leading industry stakeholders committed to supporting the sustainable development of tourism in Viet Nam as well as the Viet Nam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT). Apart from providing advice to tourism-related policies, we work closely with our local and international partners to help promoting Viet Nam through multiple platforms. We are very happy to work with Visa and to be able to discuss their insights, computing power and international best practices. The MoU is a good start and we look forward to a mutually beneficial relationship for sustainable tourism growth in Viet Nam.” — VNS