Despite working in the tourism industry, I must admit that travel is not a priority expenditure of people, it is second to their essential needs such as eating, sleeping, or daily consumption. Therefore, only when they have accumulated certain assets, their income is high and their standard of living improves, they will start spending on tourism. At this point, Vietnam is having a favorable condition in Southeast Asia. Looking at the context of Vietnam in the past 5 years, we have become an economic and production center of the region with strong economic growth. In particular, we have a potential market size only after Indonesia with a population of nearly 100 million, of which it is forecasted that nearly 30% of the population by 2030 will be a new middle class with high spending capacity. Therefore, I think it is not necessary to prove the potential of the Vietnamese domestic market, but we can confirm that the domestic market plays a very important role, in terms of both size and purchasing power.
Moreover, the role and potential of the Vietnamese market is also not a new story. In previous years, while Vietnam still hadn’t paid much attention to the domestic market, other countries like Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Thailand showed a certain interest in Vietnamese tourists. They all set up tourism representative offices in Vietnam with many promotion programs and strategies. In addition, according to various reports in recent years, the spending of Vietnamese on outbound travel has grown rapidly and their spending is also very large. This is also proof that the Vietnamese tourist market is always a fertile and potential market for not only businesses and localities in Vietnam but also other countries around the world. The issue is that Vietnamese businesses and destinations must have a different perspective and approach to unlock the potential of domestic tourists.