Facing the manpower crisis in the tourism sector caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, six travel agencies of Hanoi have cooperated to open a center for in-house training, aiming at providing practical tourism skills for staff and students specializing in tourism.

Pedestrian streets around Hoan Kiem lake/ Photo: Cong Hung

The Covid-19 pandemic has been wreaking havoc on the tourism sector and tour-operators. Travel agents have to lay off workers; or the staff themselves have to change to another employment.

Given the situation, tourism workers need to be retrained for equipping themselves with new job skills, knowledge and adaptability to suit themselves to the new situation. 

Mindful of this, six travel companies in Hanoi, including VietSense Travel, MyTravel, Ascend Travel, AZA Travel, Anh Duong Tour and Asia Land Travel have joined hand to found the Practical Travel Training Center (Prato).

The center offers a range of training courses, with the aim of providing practical tourism skills for trainees who are staffs of travel agencies, tourism students or people interested in the sector. 

The teachers of the center are the CEOs of travel companies themselves, who have broad and practical travel experiences to guide the trainees to improve their professional skills.

According to Mr. Nguyen Van Tai, VietSense Tourism’s director and founder of the project, Prato's training classes focus on practical skills on tourism management, tour building, coordinating transportation and accommodation bookings as well as tourism English.

"Each tour operator has its own strengths and secrets in tourism management.  It takes years of work to accumulate such know-how. We are now willing to share this knowledge with everyone who is interested, so that tourism has much better employees and tourism companies can endure this difficult period," he said.