Vietnam arrivals recover to post full-year growth
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Vietnam ended 2015 with a slight increase in visitor arrivals, following a dramatic recovery in the latter part of the year.
The country suffered 14 consecutive months of year-on-year declines, in terms of international visitor arrivals, including the first six months of 2015. This was largely due to a sharp drop in visitors from mainland China due to tensions between the two countries that surfaced in mid-2014, and a downturn in Russian visitors.
But arrivals started to pick up again in July 2015 and continued to climb in the second half of the year, reaching a full-year total of 7.94 million visitors, 0.9% more than 2014.
According to the full-year figures published by the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT), a strong December helped Vietnam avoid a full-year decline.
International arrivals to Vietnam jumped 15.0% in the final month of the year, to 760,798. Mainland China remained Vietnam’s largest visitor source market in 2015, despite arrivals falling 8.5% to 1.78m. South Korea, which was one of VNAT’s success stories last year, contributed 1.11m visitors, up 31.3% year-on-year. This followed a significant increase in air lift between the two countries.
Japan (+3.6% to 671,379), the US (+10.7% to 491,249) and Taiwan (+12.8% to 438,704) completed the top five source markets.
Russia remained Vietnam’s largest source of European visitors, despite a 7.1% decline to 338,843 arrivals, while Australian arrivals fell 5.4% to 303,721. The ASEAN countries contributed a combined total of more than 1.3m visitors to Vietnam last year, led by Malaysia (+4.1% to 346,584) and Singapore (+16.9% to 236,547).
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