Da Nang is now seeing an upward trend in the number of so-called zero-dong tours, creating more challenges for local State management agencies in ensuring the quality of tourism products and guaranteeing the city’s safe and healthy tourism environment.

Visitors at the Huyen Khong Cave in the Marble Mountains Tourist Area

Commenting about the zero-dong tour boom, some tourism service providers said this is a form of competition in price amongst travel firms, mostly applied to the Chinese and South Korean tourists.

Tour bookers only pay Da Nang-based operators low prices for their package tours in the city. However, when arriving in Da Nang, they are taken to shopping malls and gift shops where they will be persuaded to buy items at inflated prices instead of visiting popular tourist attractions and enjoying high-end accommodation.

The local travel agencies and tour guides will receive commissions from the shops in a bid to keep running such tours. Worse still, the shops are mainly Chinese-owned and will almost always take cash exclusively. The whole business activity revolving around the ‘zero-dong’ tours leaves little room for local travel firms, while the city’s tourism sector suffers tax collection losses.

Some tourism experts affirmed that zero-dong tours bring problems rather than benefits for the city as such tours have resulted in the unfair competitive environment between travel businesses, and the low quality of tourism services.

Therefore, in the first 8 months of this year, an inspection team from the municipal Department of Tourism carried out a total of over 157 inspections to travel agencies. As a result, administrative fines totalling around 330 million VND were imposed on 46 organisations and individuals for violating Viet Nam’s regulations about tourism activities.

In addition, 1 Chinese and 6 Korean nationals were given fines of 125 million VND in total for conducting illegal tour guiding activities in the city.

In attempting to solve the problem, the focus will be on tightening the management of foreigners who are temporarily residing in the city, and effectively implementing regulations on managing foreigners working in the city.

Also, interdisciplinary inspection teams will be established to check the origin and quality of goods, and their displayed prices, at shopping centres and restaurants, as well as to prevent tax collection losses at tourism businesses specialising in serving Chinese and Korean visitors.

The municipal Department of Police will check temporary residence cards of foreigners who are working and living in the city.

Mr Nguyen Xuan Binh, Deputy Director of the Tourism Department, stressed the need for the local Travel Association and the Tour Guide Club to tighten the management of the performances by its member tour guides, as well as help them enhance their professional skills, and raise their awareness about their work attitude, ethics, responsibilities, and regarding tourism activities.

He added heed would be paid to increasing checks and monitoring of closed tourism business establishments, and mainstreaming Viet Nam’s regulations about tourism activities into tourism promotion programmes in such foreign markets as China and South Korea.