LETTER FROM THE TOURISM ADVISORY BOARD (TAB) TO PM NGUYEN XUAN PHUC

Your Excellency Nguyen Xuan Phuc,

The Tourism Advisory Board send their warmest compliments to you and your colleagues and congratulate you on the decision to reopen the domestic tourism sector.  This is an essential step for the industry.  However, this will not itself relieve the acute pain being felt, by the sector, without the safe opening to international visitors from those countries that are considered safe and with the confidence that visitors, from those particular countries, do not represent a health risk to  our own citizens.  We stress that health and safety of our citizens have to be balanced with the economic considerations and gains.  

Whilst we consider this matter to be urgent, in order to enable us open to international markets, we consider it essential that we have an agreed upon a process and a set of procedures for opening.  One particular procedure is negotiation of bi - lateral gathering and procedures for implementation.  

On bi - lateral arrangements , we recommend that the government with Ministry of Foreign Affairs should be in charge of the procedures with the support of MCST , MOT , National Steering Committee for Covid Prevention and Control and TAB ( representing the industry ) . We also want to be ahead or at least on the same time frame as our regional competitors .

The procedures should include :

• The opening of flights and ensuring that the flights are direct ( therefore it may be necessary to allow some charter flights to some markets );
• Allowing visa free travel;  
• Requiring incoming visitors to complete health declarations;  
• Temperature checks on arrival;  
• Agreement to random Covid testing on arrival and agreed testing protocols;  
• Agreement to install a recognized tracking app whilst in Vietnam;  Other safety measures as agreed in all safe tourism operations;  
• Implementation of closure measures (as necessary) should there is a risk of community transmission.  

Before opening to a particular country, we need to make sure that they have met a set of RELIABLE metrics, which help ensure safety for our own citizens and we would intend to work with Vietnam CDC and WHO representative office to help develop a set of  key metrics that can be easily obtained and verified.  These will likely include such measures as active cases, containment of community spread and trending.

Our recommendation is that we commence negotiations with our most important source markets and countries who have significant inward foreign direct investments.  These Agreements can be put in place and allowed to become effective once the designated metrics have been met and direct flights are available.  Inevitably the first countries are likely to be from Asia and Australasia.  The metrics will ensure a gradual opening and it is necessary that this is a step by step approach so we can learn as we go and improve the process over time, as we have no precedent for this new challenge.  Whilst we understand the current discussions on opening the "island destinations" to foreign visitors this again will not be sufficient to ensure the survival of many hotels and businesses.  

In the meantime, we can also consider offering integrated, fully inclusive, safe resorts which have met safe operations criteria to groups of travelers on charterer flights, which enable groups to be contained in one area to avoid the risk of community spread.  In conjunction with these actions and steps we need to be ready with a promotion campaign promoting Vietnam as a "safe haven" and showing the incredible results achieved by Vietnam in containment and prevention of community spread of Covid 19.

All members of TAB feel proud,  lucky and privileged to be living in Vietnam at this time. We have fully supported your policies and will continue doing so.

We hope thay you will find the recommendations helpful and we are ready to provide resources to assist in the process and implementation.

Please click here for the letter from TAB