Tour guides and workers in tourism sector will play important roles in supporting tourists when they come to Hue

Many departments and sectors work together

The Provincial People’s Committee has just issued a regulation on collaboration to support tourists in provincial area. According to the regulation, tourists will be provided measures to ensure their safety in the situations of coping with accidents, robberies or being victims of thefts.

Besides that, strengthening ability of receiving feedbacks, suggestions on service quality and prices; receiving complaints and requests for handling divergences, contradictions in goods and service transactions; as well as in the situations of leaving belongings, luggage on public transports. Furthermore, if visitors are in need, they will be consulted and provided with the information, services for tourists and exit and entry procedures, etc.

Mr. Le Ngoc Sanh, Secretariat Chief of Thua Thien Hue Tourism Department said that not only tourism sector; the subjects being applied by this regulation are all of the state management agencies, as well as the organizations and individuals related to the activities of supporting tourists in the provincial area. According to the regulation, Tourism Department is responsible for receiving tourists’ information, as well as their relevant feedbacks and suggestions and handling tasks within its jurisdiction; initiatively collaborating with the Market Management Department to solve the issues related to not listing prices and selling goods at the prices which are not listed; announcing to the Department of Transportation to deal with the issues related to transport and taxi services, etc., and announcing to the Health Department to deal with food safety issues. 

According to Mr. Le Ngoc Sanh, an element of the regulation which will create the effectiveness in tourists support is the monitoring mechanism. According to the request of the Provincial People’s Committee, the Tourism Department will synthesize the quarterly, 6-month and year-end periodic reports, evaluate the situations and report the results to define more effective orientations.

Tourists learn about Hue through sightseeing activity

Supporting in depth

Mr. Le Ngoc Sanh analyzed that tourism is a general economic sector which relates to most other sectors. However, after many years of operations, there have not been much cooperation done, some sectors have not put tourism into joint goals when investing to develop.

Sometimes, it leads to the confusion when tourism begins to reach development. For example, when developing a model of community tourism, which related to agriculture, transportation and industry and trade sectors, if there is a sector being outsider, the model, then, will certainly face many difficulties.

In a survey of garden house and craft village tourist destinations at the end of 2018, the tourism sector had coordinated with the Department of Cultural, Industrial Policy and Promotion of districts and cities to get a closer coordination.

Mr. Nguyen Van Phuc, Vice Director of Tourism Department stressed, “With craft village tourism, tourism sector can only deal with the issues on tourist source, collaborating in tours and improving service quality. However, in order to sustainably develop tourism, it is necessary to have the support of the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion so that the craft villages can ‘live’. This is the way to support tourists, helping them to have full experiences when coming to the destinations. On the other hand, with the cooperation, the resource will be stronger and the chance of success for products will be higher.”

According to the regulation on coordination to support tourists, the Provincial People’s Committee assigned the Tourism Promotion Information Center to act as a clue to receive information and calls from tourists when they ask for supporting information on tourism, give feedbacks on tourist service quality or call for help in emergencies when having problems in provincial area through the hot lines: 0234.3828288 or 0234.3501111.

Tourism leaders said that the responsibilities of relevant departments and tourism enterprises have never been highly appreciated in developing and supporting tourists over the time. Especially the coordination between tourism sector and the police has helped to quickly make good Hue tourism’s bad images.

Typically, Hue tourism sector has promptly found and returned many important documents to a Spanish tourist; found and returned a large amount of money to a Japanese tourist, etc., or partly limited tourist hustle.

Mr. Truong Thanh Minh, Director of Tourism Promotion Center said that, strengthening the channels to receive information of tourists has been deployed by the sector, such as providing hotline to support tourists, building the system of signposts with supporting information, taking advantage of information technology to support tourists through smart phones, etc.  

“It will be effective to work with the professional associations to enhance the support. Each tour guide and hotel, restaurant staff, etc., is an individual who is always willing to respond to tourists’ questions, as well as receive and promptly inform authorities about incidents effecting tourism, etc. Because these individuals directly work with tourists, contributing to improving the abilities of satisfying the tourists of enterprises and tourism sector”, said Mr. Truong Thanh Minh

Story, photos: Duc Quang