Poor promotion, personnel and infrastructure are the main weak points of Vietnam's tourism industry, local newspaper Labor reported Monday.

The weakest point lies in promotion ability, the newspaper stated, noting that the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) has yet to know which specific activities should be done to promote the local tourism abroad in 2007, and that it still has no promotion offices in such big tourism markets as Japan and China's Shanghai.

Vietnam faces shortages of tourist guides, especially those who have good command of unpopular foreign languages, and big hotels. Just over 30 Vietnamese guides know Korean, and few large-scale hotels are available in the country.

Many local travel companies are operating in an unprofessional manner without close coordination among themselves. Besides, they have yet to fully tap various kinds of tourism, including home- stay and eco-tourism.

Mainly due to the weakness, up to 85 percent of foreign tourists to Vietnam do not come back to the country again, the newspaper quoted the figure from the Vietnamese General Statistics Office.

Vietnam welcomed nearly 1.85 million international arrivals in the first half of this year, a year-on-year rise of 7.2 percent. Number of visitors from Laos, the Philippines, Spain and the Chinese mainland and its Taiwan province, declined in the period, while those from all other major tourism markets of Vietnam increased, the statistics office said.

Vietnam hopes to welcome 5.5-6 million foreign visitors and 25- 26 million domestic ones in 2010, and make total tourism revenues of 4-4.5 billion U.S. dollars in the year.

The country hosted nearly 3.5 million international arrivals and 16 million domestic visitors in 2005, according to the VNAT.

Source: Xinhua