Improving the competitiveness of Vietnam's tourism industry in the period of international economic integration

ASEAN region, or visa issuance at border gates needs to be done quickly and simply to attract visitors from other countries to visit Vietnam.

1.10. Private enterprise development

Support the development of private tourism enterprises. Support enterprises in developing human resources and allow them to participate in national tourism promotion activities.

Create a complete legal framework to regulate businesses to ensure that they provide services that meet required standards, avoiding price competition and reducing service quality.

Accelerate the equitization of inefficient state-owned tourism enterprises. Study the equitization of all enterprises to reduce the management burden on the state.

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Attract foreign direct investment to provide capital and professional tourism business management skills. Domestic enterprises can learn from foreign enterprises and cooperate with them to provide tourism services.

1.11. Sustainable tourism development

Absolutely adhere to the principles of sustainable tourism development to ensure the ability to meet future tourism needs. Resources must be exploited and used rationally, overuse must be limited and waste must be minimized, exploitation must be linked to conservation, in accordance with the overall planning. Special attention must be paid to protecting the natural environment, prohibiting any destruction of the environment and natural resources.

2. Solutions for associations

There is a need to develop a tourism association system to support the development of tourism industry associations with a solid organizational structure. These associations need to play a supporting role for their members and ensure that their members operate effectively.

Act in accordance with industry and association standards and practices. Members who violate or defraud customers will be expelled from the association.

Encourage Vietnamese businesses to participate in regional and international professional associations to create conditions for them to learn and apply industry standards and practices to improve the quality of tourist services. At the same time, the participation of businesses in regional and international tourism associations will create conditions for exchange and promote the image of Vietnamese tourism.

3. Solution group for tourism businesses

3.1. Focus resources on supporting the completion of key tourism products while continuing to develop new tourism products.

Building and perfecting the tourism product system is always a core issue for the Vietnamese tourism industry. We need to effectively implement an inter-sectoral coordination strategy to create high-quality tourism products. It would be one-sided to rely solely on the resources of tourism businesses to build tourism products. Tourism businesses are only capable of building and selling products on the basis of a favorable business environment created by the state.

It is necessary to pay attention to the price factor in tourism. The price of tourism products needs to be flexible according to each target group and the time of exploitation, but it is necessary to avoid the situation of competing to lower prices to compete for customers, because that not only causes immediate economic damage, but also reduces the reputation of each business brand and unintentionally causes doubts about the quality of Vietnam's tourism products. Avoid price discrimination between foreign tourists and Vietnamese tourists.

3.2 Coordinating tourism activities with other economic sectors

Tourism is a highly integrated service industry and it requires linkages between industries. Tourism products are the result of coordination between service providers. Tourists require a complete tourism product including both physical goods and services formed from the services of different producers. All subjects of all economic sectors participating in tourism business, whether they want to or not, must link together to consume products in the tourism market. A single product of poor quality, a customer dissatisfaction at any stage will sooner or later affect the attractiveness of the entire Vietnamese tourism product system.

Unhealthy competition manifests itself in many forms such as indiscriminate price reduction, forcing tourists to pay more, using a team of touts to compete for customers among tourism businesses, the chaotic situation of prices and quality in tourism services causing bad impressions on tourists and affecting the reputation of the entire Vietnamese tourism industry in general. To solve this situation, small tourism service providers need to proactively link up into chains, associations or strong corporations, representing a tourist destination, a locality... to create a common strength in exploiting tourism business activities. Independent, individual consumption of one or a few services can also occur and is carried out with the wishes of each business, but in reality, tourism business activities under the conditions of increasingly deep international integration as today, this case is very rare and unsustainable.

The closer the connection between tourism businesses, the higher the business efficiency will be. This coordination is not only to share the source of customers, but more importantly, to share costs (airlines, hotels, domestic transportation...), creating unity and efficiency in promoting the brand, avoiding duplication in building and implementing tourism products, creating competitiveness with foreign competitors right at home.

Tourists who are well served will come in larger numbers, thus increasing the ability to consume products of each business and each business household. The competitiveness of businesses, and more broadly, the national level, will also increase with the level of connection.

Tourism businesses need to improve their relationships with transportation and accommodation service providers. To establish relationships with transportation service providers, tourism businesses need to take the following measures:

For auto transport providers

Tourism businesses need to have connections with transport companies to have the best measures in mobilizing and selecting vehicles and drivers suitable for specific tourism programs. All will create the best conditions in serving the needs of tourists.

Businesses need to continue to select new suppliers, especially private carriers, with beautiful, modern, and comfortable vehicles to sign contracts with.

 For Vietnamese civil airlines

The number of international visitors by air accounts for a very large proportion, about 70-80% of the total number of international tourists to Vietnam. Therefore, tourism businesses need to establish, maintain and strengthen relationships with airlines to reduce pressure from airlines in increasing prices, lowering service quality, as well as creating favorable conditions in the process of picking up and dropping off tourists.

 For the railway industry

Currently, international tourist sources from neighboring countries in the region such as China and ASEAN are very large. Railway transportation is the main means of transport for these tourist sources. Therefore, businesses

The tourism industry also needs to take measures to create good relationships with the railway industry to best serve tourists.

Tourism businesses need to perfect their relationships with accommodation service providers, because tourists’ accommodation needs are one of the basic needs in their travel journey. To do this well, tourism businesses need to:

- Maintain relationships with high-end, 4-5 star hotels, because the demand of international visitors to Vietnam for high-end hotels is very high. Meanwhile, these high-end hotels are often overloaded, lacking rooms, lacking services...

- Coordinate with hotels and restaurants to add new services to the hotel to enhance the quality of the business's tourism products.

- During peak tourist seasons, businesses need to make reservations in advance with binding commitments to avoid room shortages.

In addition to establishing relationships with businesses providing transportation and accommodation services, establishing good relationships with entertainment centers is also very important. In addition to familiar tourist and entertainment locations, Vietnamese tourism businesses should direct customers' attention to traditional cultural and artistic forms: tuong, cheo, quan ho folk songs, Hue royal court music, etc. Among them, water puppetry is a favorite art form of many international tourists.

3.3. Building a tourism website

For a travel company, a website will play a very important role in providing information about services as well as conducting online sales transactions. Therefore, to build a successful travel website, businesses should carefully survey what is suitable for their business.

your business and refer to websites that provide similar services. A travel website must have the following basic functions:

- Provide information about tourism businesses.

- Provide information about the services that the business has (Tour, Visa, Hotel, Transport...)

- Information about famous tourist destinations, introduction to the country, people, climate, nature...

- Information about tours, hotels....

- Set up tools that allow customers to order online (Booking tours, booking hotels, booking tickets...)

- Contact page and online support.

- In addition, you should add a Customer Comments section to your website. This is a point that makes customers more interested and trust in your business's tourism services. In addition, businesses can also receive customer feedback to make adjustments to suit their needs.

With the above features, the tourism business website can completely become an effective business tool.

3.4. Improving the quality of tourism human resources

Human resources play a very important role in tourism development, having a decisive impact on the business performance of tourism enterprises. Whether tourism enterprises can develop or not depends largely on their staff. Therefore, tourism enterprises need to consider direct human resource development as a top priority.

Businesses need to organize orientation programs and develop new employees: create conditions for new employees to learn about the business, become aware of their position, role and the department they will work in.

Enterprises should regularly organize training programs to develop their staff. Enterprises should monitor the professional development, expertise and working skills of employees in each department as a basis for planning and organizing training and development programs. At the same time, enterprises should have plans to rotate employees between departments so that employees can better understand each other's work, thereby proposing effective management measures.

In addition, tourism businesses need to build standard technological processes or build service quality according to ISO standards. On that basis, all employees and departments must be trained and implemented according to the process. Therefore, training and developing employees must be a regular task of the business.

Business leaders must create an equal environment to encourage employees. Specific standards and conditions for each job position must be publicly announced. Those who are promoted to higher positions must be more capable.

CONCLUDE

Facing the trend of globalization, Vietnam is in the process of deep integration into the international economy. The face of Vietnamese society is changing day by day, and the country has achieved many great achievements, especially economic and social achievements. In the process of integration, the tourism service industry is gradually becoming a key economic sector, contributing significantly to Vietnam's GDP.

International economic integration opens up many new opportunities for the tourism service industry, making this industry increasingly develop. However, not only opportunities, tourism services also have to face many challenges and difficulties. Having integrated, means accepting to comply with the rules of the game on the world's common playground. Therefore, in order to stand firm and continue to develop in the new environment, new opportunities, the entire industry is forced to improve, enhance service quality and thereby enhance its competitiveness.

Given the importance of tourism to socio-economic development, many economic experts believe that Vietnam “should not underestimate” the tourism economy and needs more investment in this sector. Therefore, it is urgent to carefully study the current situation and development potential of the tourism industry as well as find directions and propose solutions to improve the competitiveness of the tourism industry today.

Hopefully, the thesis " Improving the competitiveness of Vietnam's tourism industry in the period of international economic integration " will be a useful reference for the General Department of Tourism, tourism service companies and relevant ministries in developing the tourism industry in Vietnam.