Vu The Binh, head of the administration's travel department, said Korean tourist numbers were increasing and Koreans were destined to be the country's most valuable tourism group.
“However, they often visit Vietnam through unregistered Korean travel agencies with guides that haven't yet been licensed,” Binh told local travel agencies and the Ho Chi Minh City authorities at a meeting in the city last Friday.
The Koreans make up the second biggest group of tourists, after the Chinese, with 480,000 Koreans arriving in Vietnam last year.
This marked an increase of 12.7 percent on last year's figures, meaning Koreans accounted for more than 11 percent of the country's total international arrivals.
An official from the HCMC Department of Tourism said many Korean tour operators have organized city tours for tourists.
The unregistered operators illegally employ Korean or international guides and earn profits in the country without paying taxes, the department's deputy director La Quoc Khanh said.
He added that this also happens in other countries like Japan and Spain where there is a shortage of tour guides.
Khanh said official investigators discovered about seven or eight illegal Korean travel operations last year.
Among them was one company which had its four Korean tour guides deported, he said.
Foreign tour guides are not allowed to work legally in Vietnam.
Instead, international travel operators are licensed to set up joint ventures with local partners but this will change under Vietnam's commitment to the World Trade Organization as the industry will be forced to open up to 100 percent foreign investment after 2014.
Legalize operations
Vo Anh Tai, director of the Saigontourist Travel Service Company, said it was hard for local businesses to make inroads into the Korean travel market, mainly due to the shortage of Korean-speaking Vietnamese tour guides.
About 1,400 tour guides are certified in HCMC out of the 5,000 tour guides nationwide.
Yet, only 14 of those in HCMC are Korean speakers.
“Korean travel operators close the market so tour operators in other countries have difficulty getting in and attracting Korean tourists,” Tai said, adding Korean expatriates in Vietnam book hotels themselves or order travel services for small groups of tourists coming in from Korea.
Saigontourist Travel Service Co., owned by giant Saigontourist Holdings, is one of the country's very few local businesses running tours for Korean people in partnership with Korean tour operators.
However, compared to the company's other international arrivals, the tours bring in few Korean tourists.
Binh said the government encourages international operators to organize tours using the established legal framework and warmly welcomes foreign tourists to the country.
He said the administration will lead an investigation of unregistered Korean businesses in order to penalize them and then legalize their operations by making them use Vietnamese tour guides or Korean interpreters.
Khanh said the service is running a pilot project to train Vietnamese-speaking Korean tour guides as interpreters.
The first training course was attended by 37 unlicensed Korean tour guides who have since been reclassified as interpreters and the second course, with the same number of enrolments, will be held later this month, he added.
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VIETNAM TOURISM FACTS
The Vietnam National Administration of Tourism says:
■ Vietnam attracted 4.2 million foreign visitors in 2007, an increase of 17 percent on the previous year
■ The tourism industry aims to attract five million foreign tourists this year
■ Vietnam is to host the ASEAN Tourism Forum 2009, the region's biggest tourism event, in Hanoi with a focus on tourism cooperation |
Reported by Minh Quang |
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