Homestay is a form of tourism where visitors will be in the same house and living with indigenous people as members of the family, to explore the lifestyle of the people, experience their daily lives to know culture of the people there. Halong Bay has many favorable conditions for developing homestay tourism
Photo: TM
Homestay is quite popular in many countries around the world. From a broader perspective as in Malaysia, tourism homestay widespread in 13 states with nearly 3,300 households from 230 villages throughout the country participating in. Each year over 160,000 visitors, including more than 30,000 international visitors mainly from Japan, Korea, Singapore .... In Vietnam, tourism homestay has recently developed in the Mekong Delta; for example, Ben Tre, Vinh Long, Can Tho…
Compared with other provinces and cities, Quang Ninh province ha enough elements to exploit homestay tourism. It has many historical and cultural relics, scenic spots, and traditional villages such as the Hung Hoc woven bamboo village (Hung Yen), the Dong Trieu ceramic village, planted vegetables in Dong Trieu village, especially on Ha Long Bay, there are fishing villages feature Ha Long culture ... One or two years ago, officials of Marine Cultural Conservation Center (Ha Long Bay Management Department) had ideas of develping homestay tourism in Cua Van fishing village.
With the desire of building an unique tour, unlike the boring tour now takes visitors on board-visit hang-on terminals, The Indochina Yacht jointstock Corporation is an enterprise that is in advanced of developing the idea of homstay tourism. The company has developed the tours taking tourists to the historic cultural relics at Quan Lan, tours visiting Ha Long Bay combing with trash and planting mangroves. Inspite of not being successful in these above tours, the Indo Yacht Company has maintained the tours that take the tourists to visit the Ba Hang fishing village by bamboo boats, which attracts many tourists. Recently, there has also been experimenting with homestay tours taking visitors to historical and cultural relics, scenic Yen Duc (Dong Trieu) in which visitors acted as farmers.
Many international tourists are willing to spend more than $ 20 a day for being
farmers in Tra Que vegetable village (Hoi An). Photo: baodulich.com.vn
Before the Indochina Yacht Company, some travel agencies had gone to Ha Long to do construction survey homestay tours for visitors participating in trash, planting mangroves. However, it was not the tourist products.
According to Mr Haji Hamdan, Chairman of Malaysia Homestay Association, making homestay tourism is not difficult. The first thing is to ensure safety for tourists; the second is about good infrastructure, convenient transportation. Along with that, volunteers need to be willing in tourism, each village should have at least 10 households participating in homestay tourism. These households are willing to participate in training courses to manage and serve the visitors better and better.
Experience shows that, in addition to tourism potentials of the locality, homestay tourism development depends on the combination of tourist enterprises, local citizens and aunthorities. Obviously, Quang Ninh homestay tourism potential is great. However, it is up to the above mentioned combination.
