VNAT’s Chairman Nguyen Trung Khanh speaking at the Ceremony (Photo: Organising Board)

VNAT’s Chairman Nguyen Trung Khanh highly appreciates Royal Caribbean International Group has chosen Vietnam as the venue for the Ceremony to celebrate the recovery of the international cruise industry.

VNAT’s Chairman Nguyen Trung Khanh stated, from the beginning of the year 2023, Vietnam's tourism industry has continuously received good news when it continued to recover positively. In July, Vietnam welcomed more than 1 million international visitor arrivals, this is also the first 1 million visitors/month since Vietnam resumed international tourism on 15th March 2022. Generally, in 7 months, the total number of international visitors to Vietnam reached about 6.6 million arrivals, equaling 83% of the whole year plan in 2023. In which, visitors coming by sea reached nearly 30,200 arrivals.

Regarding the potential of sea and island tourism, nature is favoured with a long coastline with thousands of large and small islands, diverse ecosystems and famous bays such as Ha Long Bay, Nha Trang Bay, etc. Sea and island tourism is a key tourism product of Vietnam, so cruise tourism has been interested in development orientation by the Government of Vietnam. Infrastructure at several seaports has been invested, upgraded and modernised such as Sai Gon, Nha Trang, Quy Nhon, Tien Sa ports...

Simultaneously, the roads connecting the seaport areas to the city centres have also been invested, expanded, upgraded, and provided highly convenient for cruise passengers. The system of infrastructure, tourism facilities is invested and upgraded to be modern and close to the ports to welcome cruise tourists. More above, Vietnam's seaport systems are all touchpoints surrounded and conveniently connected by many attractions of heritage, cultural, ecological tourism, tourist centres, and shopping sites.

Delegates taking souvenir photo (Photo: Organising Board)

Besides, Vietnam has a number of deep-water seaport systems that can meet the docking requirements of a number of large cruise ships in the world such as: Ha Long International Passenger Port (Quang Ninh Province), Chan May Port (Thua Thien Hue Province), Tien Sa Port (Da Nang), Dam Mon Port, Nha Trang Port (Khanh Hoa Province), Phu My Port, Sao Mai - Ben Dinh Port (Ba Ria - Vung Tau Province)...

With the efforts of the tourism industry, over the years, Vietnam destination has been honoured to receive many awards from the World Travel Awards (WTA). Among them are: World's Leading Heritage Destination 2019, 2020, 2022; World's Best Golf Destination 2019, 2021 and many more regional awards.

To promote cruise tourism, many innovative policies have been issued in order to attract cruise visitors to Vietnam, such as promoting reform of administrative procedures at seaports, reducing port fees for ships entering Vietnam by route or multiple times, visa exemption for all international visitors to Phu Quoc Island within 30 days.

International tourists go on tours in Ba Ria - Vung Tau and Ho Chi Minh City (Photo: Organising Board)

From 15th August 2023, Vietnam officially applied a new visa policy for international visitors such as: (1) increase the duration of e-visa up to 90 days, allowing multiple entries; (2) providing e-visa to citizens of all countries and territories simultaneously with the list of 13 air border gates, 16 land border gates and 13 sea border gates allowing foreigners to enter and exit by e-visa;  (3) increase the temporary stay duration for citizens of 13 countries exempted from visa requirement by Vietnam from 15 days to 45 days. This new policy will create favourable conditions for tourists as well as cruise lines to plan to travel in Vietnam. Vietnam is ready to become a long-term and repeated stopover of tourists in the chain of journeys to discover Asia and Southeast Asia.

Expressing delight to RCI including Vietnam on the 2023 cruise of the Spectrum of the Seas with destinations such as Ba Ria-Vung Tau, Ho Chi Minh City, Nha Trang, Da Nang and Hue, VNAT’s Chairman Nguyen Trung Khanh indicated that, this is a good premise for Vietnam to continue to welcome many world-class cruise ships to other famous tourist destinations such as: Ha Long - Cat Ba, Son Tra - Hoi An, Nha Trang - Cam Ranh, Phan Thiet - Mui Ne, Phu Quoc… VNAT’s Chairman Nguyen Trung Khanh hopes that RCI will strengthen coordination to promote Vietnam as a leading destination in the world in the near future.

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