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Friday, March 29, 2024

Teo takes part in Viet expo

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Tourism Secretary Wanda Teo led Philippine participants in the 12th International Travel Expo Ho Chi Minh City (ITE HCMC 2016), Vietnam’s foremost tourism trade event, held at the Saigon Exhibition and Convention Centre.

The travel expo was held on September 8 to 10, 2016.

“In addition to promoting our country as a short-haul destination, we learned new things about the policies discussed during the Ministerial meeting and our participation during the ITE HCMC and how it grew to be the largest travel event in the country’s Mekong region. This event mainly promotes leisure tourism, luxury travel, MICE, medical and aesthetics tourism, spa and wellness and even education tourism in Vietnam as well as neighboring countries like Cambodia and Laos,” Teo said.

“Aside from being our friendly neighbors in the region, these three countries which used to be known as Indo-China are also our immediate competitors in travel and tourism. Experiencing first-hand how they do tourism marketing and communications will help a lot in our own planning and implementation,” Teo said.

The 12th ITE HCMC coincided with a closed-door Ministerial Meeting which was attended by Teo and other  executives of national tourism organizations in Southeast Asia as well as representatives from China.

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Organized in 2005, the ITE HCMC has an average of 300 exhibiting travel companies, international and regional hosted buyers, and media.   

In 2015, it recorded a total of 23,000 visitors including consumers.

Supervised by the Market Development Group of the Department of Touris, a 36-meter booth was set up and showcased Boracay, a top destination for the Vietnamese travel market, as well as other attractions.

Six Filipino tour operators engaged in business-to-business (B2B) meetings with current and prospective Vietnamese travel trade partners.   

These Philippine-based tour companies were Ang’s Tour Inc., HRG Philippines-Marsman Drysdale Travel Inc., Jeron Travel, Pan-Pacific Travel Corporation, Travel Experts, Inc., and Uni-Orient.

These B2B generated bookings to the Philippines out of the tour packages developed with the Vietnamese travel trade.

In spite of online booking readily available, Vietnamese outbound travelers mainly rely on face-to-face contact with travel agents in their travel plans and decisions. Thus, participation in the biggest travel fair is one of the best approaches to gain business leads.

Outbound travel of Vietnamese to the Philippines is part of DOT’s opportunity markets producing less than 100,000 visitors per year, the agency said.

There was a steady increase of Vietnamese visitor arrivals from 2011 to 2015 with 17,781    to 31,579, respectively.

With preference for short-haul or neighboring destinations, Vietnam’s international outbound leisure travel trips numbered to 4.3 million in 2014 and forecast to grow to 6.4 million in 2020. 

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