As part of Da Nang’s post-pandemic recovery efforts, Da Nang has prioritised boosting the tourism industry on expanding links with its neighbours to make the debuts of joint reasonably-priced attractive tour packages in a bid to restore traveller confidence, stimulate travel demand for ‘the sooner, the better’ rebound of the domestic tourist market.

A picture taken at the Sun Worlds Ba Na Hills in early October

Last May, the localities of Thua Thien- Hue, Da Nang and Quang Nam jointly entered into a tourism restoration programme on the basis of win-win spirit in a bid to attract quite a lot of tourists.
Director of Hai Van Cat international travel company Nguyen Minh Xoang highlighted the significance of boosting tourism cooperation among the three central localities in creating a wide range of new high-quality products which meet the diversified needs of tourists there.

In her recent revelation, Director of the Da Nang Department of Tourism Truong Thi Hong Hanh announced the upcoming new tourism cooperation programme under the theme ‘Three Localities – One Destination’, which aims to promise travellers the most unforgettable experiences during their relaxing stay there.

Under the programme, focus will be on promoting a staycation (a portmanteau of “stay” and “vacation”), which is a period in which an individual or family stays home and participates in leisure activities within day trip distance of their home and does not require overnight accommodation

As the global coronavirus pandemic has stymied overseas travel, Vietnamese people, including those in the three central localities, over recent times, turned to a new and extreme form of staycation: transforming their hometowns into their favourite vacation spots.

For them, staycations are a really interesting way to ‘scratch their travel itch’ by staying close to home rather than travelling to faraway places.

This form of travel is less about the journey itself and more about breaking old patterns and habits to discover something new and becoming open-minded.

In fact, staycations also help ensure that hotels and resorts that usually cater to foreign travellers can keep running and working as normally as possible by catering to domestic ones.

Visitors to the three localities can find it much easier to access special travel deals offered at unprecedented attractive prices such as staying at 5-star resorts, using entertainment services, M.I.C.E service packages and community-oriented responsible travel experiences, all of which will run till 31 December.

In particular, the programme is expected to attract the participation of many big tourism businesses from the three localities and airlines nationwide in an attempt to offer the most affordable possible tour packages to tourists.

Noticeably, a tourism forum called ‘A Flow of Quintessence’ for the central key economic region and Viet Nam’s two biggest cities, namely Ha Noi and HCM City, is slated to take place in Quang Nam Province’s Hoi An next month.

The central key economic region consists of Da Nang and the provinces of Thua Thien - Hue, Quang Nam, Quang Ngai and Binh Dinh.

On the spotlight of the forthcoming event’s agenda will be the signing of many tourism cooperation agreements between the six central localities and the two Vietnamese big cities over the 2021 - 2025 period.

Aseries of public attention-catching activities on the sidelines of the forum are expected to take place this month. Notable amongst them are a webinar rolling out plans to launch tourism stimulus programmes, and the organisation of exhibitions offering a deeper insight into diversified tourism products of the regional localities.

By HA KHUE – Translated by A.T