Catering to growing travel demand of holiday-goers to Southeast Asia’s beach holiday destinations, the national flag carrier will eventually operate the HCMC-Bali route with seven flights a week. Each flight will take around four hours.

However, during the initial phase from October 27 to late March next year, the airline will have five flights a week due to operational restrictions at Bali’s Denpasar Airport, the carrier said in a release Wednesday.

The new service will be the airline’s second route to Indonesia after the Ho Chi Minh City-Jakarta route, which has been operational since 2012.

The HCMC-Phuket route, the airline’s third route to Thailand, will operate with the frequency of three flights a week, taking around two hours each way.

Le Hong Ha, deputy director of Vietnam Airlines, said the new routes would create more opportunities for travelers from Europe, Japan, South Korea and many other parts of the world to easily access famous beaches in Bali and Phuket.

Dubbed the Island of Gods and a paradise on earth with beautiful beaches, Hindu culture and vibrant nightlife, Bali has consistently been a top holiday choice for holiday-goers in Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam.

In 2017, global travel site TripAdvisor named Bali among world’s top destinations in its Travelers’ Choice Awards.

Phuket is also one of Southeast Asia’s most prominent beach resort destinations.

Citizens of ASEAN member nations can travel within the region without applying for visas and stay as a tourist for a maximum of 30 days.

According to Mastercard, Vietnam has the second fastest growing outbound market in the Asia Pacific region after Myanmar, with projected annual growth of 9.5 percent between 2016 and 2021.

Mastercard has forecast that 7.5 million Vietnamese travelers will travel outside the country in 2021.

“As a coach, I have certain pressures before each game, especially this World Cup qualification game with Thailand. But I have got used to this because I have been in many tournaments before,” Park said at a pre-match conference in Thammasat Stadium, Thailand, Wednesday.

He said he felt that the pressure to win will make things difficult for Thailand despite their preparations.

“I know Thailand have prepared carefully for this game. They have a new coach, but I think that this will be a challenging match for them, since they must win this game.”

Park said his players have had a great preparation and they will continue showing their spirit.

At the last encounter between the two teams, Vietnam beat Thailand 1-0 at the King’s Cup 2019 in June. Park said that although it was a small game, it had boosted the players’ confidence.

“In the past, Vietnam used to get bad results against Thailand. So that game can be considered as a transition. From now, the players will be more confident, not just for this game but also future clashes with Thailand,” Park said.

Thailand coach Akira Nishino broke his previous silence on Vietnam, saying: “Vietnam is a strong opponent. I know that they have made great improvements over the last few years and Thailand are facing some pressure before the game. But we will try to turn that pressure into motivation to play well. We are ready,” Nishino said.

Thailand coach Akira Nishino addresses the pre-match conference in Thailand, September 4, 2019. Photo by VnExpress/Duc Dong.

Vietnamese captain Que Ngoc Hai also expressed confidence ahead of the match.

“We’ve had 10 days to prepare for this game. Everything is ready at the moment and we all feel comfortable. In football, it’s hard to avoid collisions. The Vietnamese players won’t hesitate to make contact and they will prove their determination in the game,” Hai said.

Thailand were once the undisputed number one team in Southeast Asian football. But in the past few years, Vietnam has changed that with the Golden Dragons achieving impressive results in tournaments like the Asian Games, AFF Cup and the Asian Cup.

Vietnam has beaten Thailand at many levels since Park took over its reins. The U23 team beat Thailand 2-1 and 4-0 in their last two encounters.

The World Cup qualification match between Thailand and Vietnam will take place 7 p.m. on Thursday at the Thammasat University Stadium in Pathum Thani, Thailand, which has a capacity of 25,000. VnExpress will report the match live.

Located in Quang Ninh Province’s Quang Yen Commune, Amata City Ha Long would cover 1,720 hectares, of which 30 percent will be used for residential buildings, 18 percent for planting trees and the rest for businesses, services and transportation infrastructure, the group’s chairman Vikrom Kromadit said in a recent meeting with provincial authorities.

Quang Ninh Chairman Nguyen Van Thang said the project, about 47 km from UNESCO heritage site Ha Long Bay, was approved in principle and Amata should research it in greater detail.

Amata is investing $155 million in an industrial park (IP) in the province. Covering 714 hectares, the Song Khoai IP is located in Quang Yen Commune. Work on the IP began at the end of last year and is set to finish in the third quarter of next year.

In Vietnam, the group owns the 700-hectare Amata City Bien Hoa Industrial Park, which has been active since 1994 in the southern province of Dong Nai. It has also received permission to construct the 1,265-hectare Amata City Long Thanh in the province, which comprises an IP and a city.

Quang Ninh has received increasing infrastructure investment in recent years. It is home to Vietnam’s first private airport Van Don International Airport and is linked with Hanoi and the port city of Hai Phong via an expressway.

In May, Quang Ninh became the most competitive province in Vietnam for the second time in a row in the Provincial Competitive Index (PCI) 2018 survey released by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

From January to June, Chinese arrivals to Vietnam were nearly 2.5 million, down 3.3 percent year-on-year. Despite the slight decrease, China topped the list of foreign tourists, followed by South Korea with 2.1 million arrivals.

The drop of Chinese tourists has affected the total number of international visitors to Vietnam during the period, with growth seeing a lower increase than in previous years.

Foreign tourists in Vietnam in the six-month period this year were 8.5 million, up 7.5 percent year-on-year, according to the General Statistics Office. The growth in the same period last year was 27.2 percent. Seventy percent of visitors arrived by air.

A Bloomberg report said Chinese tourists have a big impact on Vietnam’s economy. It said a 30 percent increase in spending by Chinese tourists would boost Vietnam’s economic growth by nearly 1 percentage point. For Thailand, that would be around 1.6 percentage points.

“Chinese tourism is pretty big for ASEAN now, and all the countries rely on Chinese visitors to keep coming and keep spending,” Edward Lee, an economist with Standard Chartered Plc in Singapore, was quoted as saying in the report.

Survey results released last year by the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, show the average daily spending by a Chinese visitor in Vietnam increased from $118.6 in 2014 to $130 last year. This was below what Chinese visitors spent in Thailand ($180), Indonesia ($183) and Singapore ($446).

Chinese tourists on the waters in front of Ban Gioc waterfalls in Cao Bang Province. Photo by AFP/Hoang Dinh Nam.

Nguyen Ngoc Thien, Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism, said the country has been doing more to boost tourism promotion in China, the largest source market for Vietnam. Most countries around the world are paying a lot of attention to attracting tourists from the Chinese market, he added.

Since 2012, tourists from China have been the world’s top spender in international tourism, leading global outbound travel, South China Morning Post reported. CLSA, a Hong Kong brokerage and investment firm, predicted that more than 200 million Chinese tourists are expected to make outbound trips in 2020; and Vietnam stands to benefit, too.

Many direct flights connecting major Vietnamese major cities with China have been launched over the past years to cater to growing demand.

Chinese visitors have also been encouraged by a new policy that allows groups to visit the border province of Quang Ninh in northern Vietnam, home to the popular Ha Long Bay, for up to three days without a visa.

The Vietnamese government has also allowed Chinese nationals to apply for 30-day single-entry electronic visas for holidays and business trips.

Boom from Asia

More than 150,000 Thai nationals arrived in Vietnam in the first half of this year, posting the highest national demographic growth of 45.4 percent year-on-year, followed by Taiwan (27 percent), Indonesia (21.9 percent), South Korea (21.3 percent), the Philippines (25 percent) and Japan (12.8 percent).

The recent launch of direct flights connecting Vietnam’s top tourist destinations like Da Nang, Nha Trang and Da Lat with Thailand’s tourism hubs has pushed this growth, market observers say.

Earlier this year, Bangkok Airways opened a direct route from Bangkok to Cam Ranh, an hour south of its much busier sister Nha Trang Town in the central province of Khanh Hoa.

Vietnam’s tourism revenue in the first six months of the year is estimated at VND338.2 trillion ($14.5 billion), up 8.4 percent year-on-year.

While Vietnam is the midst of a tourism boom with a record high 15.5 million foreign arrivals in 2018, a year-on-year rise of 20 percent, the numbers have remained lower than that of neighboring countries in the region. Thailand (38 million), Malaysia (25 million) and Singapore (18.5 million) remain far ahead of Vietnam.

At a National Assembly session last year Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hue said the country needs to stop relying on crude oil and focus on tourism to sustain its economic growth. “It’s better to get one million tourists than try to find one million tons of crude oil because tourism is more eco-friendly and safe for the economy,” he said.

Many travel agencies have said that Vietnam should further relax its visa policies and simplify procedures to attract high spending tourists from Japan, North America, Northern Europe, China and South Korea. They have called for the current 15-day visa exemption extended to 30 days.

A video captures the bustling Bui Vien Street in HCMC, one of Vietnam’s most popular hangouts for foreign tourists.