Last year, despite many difficulties, travel and tourism businesses in Ho Chi Minh City maintained growth and hit their targets.

Tran The Dung, Director General of the Vietluxtour Travel Company, said the company’s international market grew more than 300% last previous year. Vietluxtour growth target this year is 25-30%.

“We expect that this year everything will stabilize and prosper. To achieve our growth goal, we think more investment should be made in advertising tourism for Vietnam, particularly Ho Chi Minh City. Every travel and tourism business must make an effort,” said Dung.

The strong performance of businesses has contributed to the recovery of HCMC’s tourism, helping the city lead the nation in revenue and tourist arrivals.

Although the number of tourists that visited the city last year was only 60% of the number who came in 2019, tourism revenue totaled 6.6 billion USD, 24% of the Vietnam’s total tourism revenue.

Ho Chi Minh City's tourism resources are varied and include history, culture, cuisine, and natural ecology. Each district has its unique tourism products.

Huynh Phan Phuong Hoang, Deputy Director General of the Vietravel Tourism Company, said that since the COVID pandemic, the trend of traveling in small, family groups without booking through a travel company has been on the rise.

“We need to focus on attracting this group of customers. We should concentrate on human resource training, focusing particularly on specialized tourism and foreign languages. It’s difficult to find guides and waiters who know uncommon foreign languages,” said Hoang.

Le Truong Hien Hoa, Deputy Director of the municipal Department of Tourism, said the demand for products such as waterway tourism, eco-tourism, spiritual, medical, cultural, and historical tourism is growing, so a key task for this year is to improve them.

The city will focus on tourism products associated with culture, history, and large-scale events recognized by UNESCO in order to attract more international visitors.  

Hoa said, “In addition to promotional events here in the city, we are also attending promotional events abroad to seek new markets. We’re adopting new methods to ensure the safety of visitors and we strongly believe we can achieve our goal for this year.”

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism hopes to welcome 20 million foreign visitors this year, so the target of 6 million set by HCMC is relatively low,” said Hoa.

In 2023 Ho Chi Minh City was honored as "Asia's Leading Business Tourism Destination", "Asia's Leading Festival and Event Destination", and was among the world’s 100 most popular tourist destinations.