At a VNAT sponsored a recent conference in Hanoi discussing the status of the ASEAN integration speakers with near unanimity said it is now time for concrete actions to bolster travel and tourism.

The industry generated nearly 4.6% of ASEAN GDP and supported 9.3 million jobs, or 3.2% of total employment in the region in 2015, they said, which clearly evidences its economic importance to the region.

For one, they said if Vietnam intends to benefit economically from the tourism industry, it needs to focus on value tourism and enticing tourists who spend money to visit the country, as opposed to simply trying to attract larger tourist arrivals.

Intuitively, high tourist arrivals with low revenues may even represent a loss to the nation, taking into account the economic cost of constructing and maintaining necessary services and infrastructure such as airports, roads and bridges.

They said Malaysia, for example, recorded 27,437,315 tourism arrivals in 2014, generating US$16.69 billion in revenue. However, Thailand with lower tourism arrivals of 24,779,668 grossed nearly double that amount at US$38.4 billion.

Another case of higher tourist arrivals but lower revenue includes Myanmar, which at 3.05 million arrivals, generated US$1.14 billion in revenue, double the revenue of Laos despite having only one-half the number of tourists.

Secondly, they said the government needs to work on easing travelers access to the country. If we want more tourists from outside the region to come and spend their dollars in Vietnam, they said, the government should ease access for them.

The government should also consider setting up dedicated ASEAN immigration lanes at all of the nation’s international airports following the lead of Bangkok in Thailand and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

Third, they said it’s time to start delving deeper into the numbers and looking at tourist compositions instead of just cursory comparative readings of the number of tourists’ arrival figures and irrelevant analysis so commonly found these days.

For example, Malaysia has consistently been one of the top contributors to tourist arrivals in ASEAN, but a large proportion of these arrivals are intra-ASEAN, with half of them coming from Singapore.

Companies in the travel and tourism related industries in Vietnam need to comprehend the importance of increasing tourism arrivals from other countries in ASEAN such as Singapore.

Intra-ASEAN arrivals is much more important to the travel and tourism related industries growth in Vietnam today than the number of arrivals from non ASEAN member countries, they said.

Most importantly along these lines, the governments of ASEAN as well as the private sector need to support the strengthening of travel and tourism in ASEAN through the creation of commissions of businesses that are committed to regional tourism development.