Vietnam’s tourism industry has been recovering from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to the strong growth of domestic tourism. In the first seven months of 2023, the industry served 76.5 million domestic tourists, including 12.5 million in July, the peak summertime holiday month. According to Outbox’s recent report on Vietnamese Summer Travel Intent 2023, domestic destinations were more preferred by travelers (56%) than international ones. The total revenues from domestic tourism reached VNĐ416.6 trillion (US$17.58 billion).
Domestic tourism in Vietnam is not just about short-term trips, but also about longer stays. The number of domestic tourists who traveled within a day was 29.8 million, while 46.7 million stayed at an accommodation.
The growth of domestic tourism is good news for the Vietnamese tourism industry, as it provides a more stable source of revenue than international tourism, and it also helps to spread the benefits of tourism more evenly across the country.
International Tourism: Slow Recovery but Hopeful Outlook
While domestic tourism has been booming, international tourism has been slowly recovering from the pandemic. Vietnam welcomed more than 6.6 million international visitors in the first seven months of 2023, hitting 83 percent of the year’s target, according to the latest report from the General Statistics Office.
The number is 6.9 times higher than that of 2022, when Vietnam fully resumed international tourism activities on March 15, but still only reaches 67.5 percent of the arrivals seen in the same period in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic happened.
July alone saw over one million foreign arrivals – the first month in the year to accomplish this feat and 6.5 percent higher than the previous month.
Among the 6.6 million tourists, 87.6 percent came to Vietnam by air (5.8 million), 11.6 percent by road (765,300), and 0.8 percent by sea (55,100).
South Korea remained the largest source market of Việt Nam tourism in the first seven months of this year with 1.9 million visitors, accounting for one-third of total international visitors to Việt Nam. It was followed by China (738,000) and the United States (445,000).
