Post COVID-19 Tourism Growth
By: Fast English Vietnam
Tags: Vietnam Tourism, Vietnam, Covid

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

With the advent of COVID-19, the travel industry has halted around the world. No longer are people spending money like they used to on holidays, because most people are stuck in their home countries and also in their homes. When everything goes back to normal, or whatever normal will look like, there will be millions of people looking outward, looking for exotic destinations to relax, looking for places where their currency can get them the most bang for their buck. Year after year over the last decade, Vietnam has proven to be a booming market for international tourism, and there is no doubt this trend should continue for years to come.

New developments are popping up all over this beautiful country with over two-thousand miles of coastline, mountains, caves, and a culture and cuisine that cannot be duplicated anywhere else in the world. The growth potential for tourism in Vietnam has only begun to be tapped. While a fifth of the income of Thailand comes from tourism, Vietnam’s tourism adds only less than ten percent to the nation’s economy. Construction sites litter the country for new resorts, new golf courses, and each year the tourism industry becomes more robust and developed in areas where options for income were once zero to none. This means more economic prosperity for the country as a whole, as jobs are being constantly created to help service this growing hospitality and service industry.

More and more people will be coming to Vietnam in the future for holiday, but will there be enough well trained staff to handle this rise comfortably? It has been noted recently that, although the government has set directives to try and increase the English proficiency in the country, this index has fallen in the year 2019, and the expected quotas for new English teachers in the countries was not exactly met. The arrival of the corona virus only made this matter worse, and now some language centres and schools struggle to hire native speaking staff. Many native English speaking teachers left the country to return home when this catastrophe hit. A closed border means many of these teachers cannot return, and native English speaking teachers who want to move to Vietnam cannot get past the closed borders.

While Vietnam is a developing, dynamic, and booming economy, it has historically been a country that has grown up without wealth or the things that money can afford. When students are asked if people eat more healthily these days than ten years ago, they always answer that in the past people ate more healthy food than now, because ten years ago there wasn’t any choice. The first McDonald’s in Vietnam only opened in 2014, in Ho Chi Minh City, and the first in Hanoi, the nation’s capital, only opened in 2017! In this aspect, Vietnam is behind the curve when it comes to international experience. It might sound foolish to say something like this and base it on McDonald’s, but travellers have for years used McDonald’s as an index for how far their currency will go in a country based on the price of a Big Mac. This is actually a huge economic indicator for many people who travel, and this index has only been in Vietnam for six years as of the year 2020.

Since Vietnam is still emerging into the international scene, this means many people in Vietnam are unaware of the way the rest of the world works. Often, students will complain that they do not learn “soft skills” at school. People educated in the West often wonder what this means, as soft skills are not classes offered by schools in Europe or the Americas. Instead, life in general is a soft skill school. Really, what people are saying is that they are ill equipped to deal with a variety of situations that most growing up in Canada or France are faced with everyday. For example, the way a restaurant or cafe works is quite obvious to anyone from these two countries, having dined and drank coffee in these establishments for all their lives. However, many youths who grew up in the countryside of Vietnam and move to a larger city for economic reasons don’t have this wealth of experience in ordering food and being served in a Western style restaurant where the chairs are not red plastic stools by the side of the road. There is a long way to go until an entire generation of Vietnamese youths grows up with this kind of air-conditioned luxury. This means that it’s much more difficult to integrate these youths into the service and hospitality industry, because there is so much they need to learn in order to perform at a basic international standard.

Vietnam has a brilliant opportunity right now to grease all the wheels of the tourism industry and prepare for the time when COVID-19 is a worry of the past and international visitors return in huge numbers. Will you be prepared for the first waves of tourists ready to spend their hard earned cash to relax and have a good time? In this critical period, the first reviews visitors leave on sites like TripAdvisor and Google will affect thousands of decisions made by travellers in the near future. Many people will be taking a holiday for the first time in a very long time, and any negative reviews they read online about poor service will send them to your competitors. Be ready for when the time comes, contact Fast English Vietnam now and start down the path to success.