Published:  15:32 Wednesday - March 15, 2017

The HCMC government is seeking to quickly diversify its tourism products with an aim to hold monthly events for tourists.

Tran Vinh Tuyen, vice chairman of HCMC People’s Committee, said the city continues to organize events such as Nguyen Hue Flower Street and Ao Dai Festival as yearly events. 

New events like fashion festival in September, light festival in November, marathon and sales promotion events will be also introduced in a new form. 

More festivals will be created so that each month there will be at lest one event hosted in the city.

The fashion festival held on the entire Nguyen Hue pedestrian street will promote Vietnam’s fashion products, allowing tourists to admire models on stage and buy products straight there. 

Similarly, with shopping festivals, the city will connect travel and airlines firms to build up promotions and shopping tours.

“HCMC will build monthly tourism products at the international level,” Tuyen said at a tourism conference last week.

Head of the HCMC Party Committee, Dinh La Thang, agreed with the leaders of HCMC People’s Committee about the monthly product development and suggested to continue building up fireworks festivals to serve tourists.

Also at the conference, HCMC also faced criticisms on its weakness for neither having a tourism development strategy, nor a master plan to speed up the non-smoke industry.

“Due to the absence of a master tourism plan, other strategies such as water-based tourism are not available. We do not have any planning on tourism resources. This is the city’s weakness and we will quickly fix it,” Tuyen said.

Tuyen said the city will quickly and carry out quality tourism planning, and may hire foreign consultants for the job if necessary.

HCMC authorities also requests museums in the city not to close during lunch break after receiving feedbacks about inconveniences that lunch break causes to tourists.