Tourism in Vietnam came to a complete halt during the pandemic caused by the Covid-19. In May 2022, all travel restrictions were lifted and people could travel freely throughout Vietnam again. Domestic tourism in the country started booming!
It is July 2022 now and before the Covid-19 this time of the year was usually the peak time for domestic tourism in Vietnam. This year, it is a bit different: it has been much busier than usual. People had been on constant lockdowns during the pandemic and were mostly contained at home for a long time. Their desires for travel grew from big to huge. They all had been waiting for the lifting of travel restrictions, so that everyone could be on the road again! And came that moment: May 2022!
It rarely happened before and possibly it never happened before that people working with tour operators and travel agencies had to work on shift 24/7 to meet the upward spike in demand for travel! It has been all the same, be it islands like Phu Quoc, Con Dao, Cat Ba, Halong Bay, or Sapa, Ha Giang, the Mekong Delta...They are all overcrowded. Airfares tick for change minute by minute... and flights are constantly booked out. Traffic jams and overloaded terminals are the norm at Noi Bai and Tan Son Nhat Airports. Counters at these two airports tally the number of domestic travelers over 100,000 people per day well surpassing the designed capacity of the domestic terminals at the two biggest airports in Vietnam.
It is worth mentioning that the North of Vietnam has been experiencing a very mild temperatures compared to normal. And it seems people are trying to escape the mild heat of the summer only to face with the "scorching heat" in tourism. Airfares, transport costs, tour prices, food prices... are getting 'red hot'. Some families decided to arrange the travel services themselves rather than booking through a local tour company or travel agency which they hope to save them some money. For many people, managing to book a trip is just like one of the miracles in their life!
So, it is faire to say that domestic tourism in Vietnam has been fully recovered in the summer of 2022: the number of tourists making trips, overloaded airport terminals, overcrowded hotels and resorts, overcrowded tourist attractions. The question is What Next?
Before the Covid-19, domestic tourism accounted for 30% of total revenue of the travel industry. The Vietnamese travel mostly in the summer only, from May through July. School holidays end in August, kids go back to school thereafter, and families travel less. Businesses in the travel and hospitality industry in Vietnam rely on international visitors to fill the gap during the other times of the year.
By far, the number of international arrivals in Vietnam is still modest even though some statistics would argue of the miraculous growth (in comparison with the time under the pandemic). The reasons could be atrributed to unstable economic and political conditions in Europe, the raging war in Ukraine that makes the flight routes farther and more costly, lack of personel and pilots at the airlines, too few international flights and too high airfares for international routes, Covid-19 travel restrictions still applicable to some countries... or could there be other reasons? We will all see if the coming winter is going to be "cool" for Vietnam tourism.
