On Dec. 9, the five-star Costa Fortuna cruise ship arrived in Quang Ninh, bringing 3,000 tourists to explore Halong Bay. The tour was operated by Chinese tour operator Orangeways, which has strength in hosting Meeting, Incentive, Convention and Exhibition (MICE) tours in Europe and Asia.
This is the first time the company has run a tour in Vietnam, supported by its local partners – Inter Cruises Vietnam and Ha Long Cruises.
Launching the marine tourism route from Fujian’s Xiamen port city to Halong Bay is the result of the cooperation program promoting the tourism development between Vietnam and China in general, and Quang Ninh and Fujian provinces in particular. It shows the creativeness and vision of enterprises of both sides in an effort to effectively tap all the strengths and potential for tourism development of the two by undertaking the contents under the cooperation programs and agreement between Quang Ninh and Fujian, bringning new opportunities in tourism development for the two provinces.
This achievement is due to the great efforts made by Quang Ninh in recent years in boosting the development of tourism, as well as alluring foreign tourism investment into the province, which has been demonstrated in the activities undertaken by the province to enhance management and improve business climate in the year of 2017. It is also one of the premises for Quang Ninh to successfully host the 2018 National Tourism Year.
As the National Tourism year is coming, Quang Ninh has made breakthroughs in promoting its tourism advantages. Tourism infrastructure have been invested with a system of restaurants, hotels, shopping malls and tourist wharves. The tourism space has been also expanded to link tourism attractions within the province. To date, 33 tourism routes in the province have been launched, 87 destinations in almost 14 localities have been recognized by the People’s Committee of Quang Ninh province. Various kinds of tourism products has been developed. Thanks to these efforts, the number of both domestic and foreign visitors coming to Quang Ninh, especially the number of those who stayed over night, has dramatically increased.
As estimated, Quang Ninh will receive 10 million tourist arrivals in 2017, of which the amount of the international tourists will be around 4.2 million. This figure seem to be a good sign for the province to achieve the goal of becoming a service-industrial province and a hi-end internationall tourism center of not only the country but also the region by 2020.
Article by Thanh Tung
