Domestic travels among Vietnamese

In Japan, according to a lot of young people, “hobby=travel”, however for Vietnamese people travel is still a special thing. The extremely exciting atmosphere when it comes to company trips also indicates the fact that for Vietnamese people, “travel=unusual thing”.

This time, we carried out a survey about travel on 603 Vietnamese people from 20 to 60 years-old.

Among 603 people participating in this survey, 80% answered that they traveled in the last 12 months. However, in terms of the frequency of traveling, 37% said they only traveled once, 22% said they traveled 2 times, this shows that travel is still a special thing for them.

So what do we know from this survey about the travel situation among Vietnamese people?

Feature 1: Booking by themselves

In terms of overseas travel, the visa is also needed and in most cases, people go on tours but for domestic travel, most people arrange the destinations by themselves. In case Vietnamese people decide the destinations, the most important factor is “the price (52%)”. Generally, arranging domestic travel destinations by tours is expensive in many cases, therefore a great number of people arrange transportation network and accommodations by themselves.

In fact, there are also cheap tours, but from the beginning, the people think that travel companies sell them at high prices, not at proper prices, so they tend not to use travel companies to travel. Besides, they don’t like to follow the itineraries decided by travel companies. It is more common for the people to use the website called nhommua (like ponpare, groupon in Japan) to buy cheap tickets than using travel companies.

Feature 2: For accommodation, people choose Nhà nghỉ, a kind of Vietnamese hostel

On average, each of the respondents in this survey has a travel budget of about 3,000,000 VND (about 16,000 Yen). This also includes overseas tourists, so this means the domestic tourists go on more cost-saving trips. These domestic tourists strongly favor Nha Nghi, a kind of Vietnamese hostel. 34% of the respondents in the survey answered that they choose to use Nha Nghi.

Nha Nghi is a kind of Vietnamese-style hostel, with the price of 200,000 VND per night (around 1,100 yen). Unlike hotels, there are cases in which Nha Nghi don’t have air-conditioner, bed facilities are simple, the bath and toilet are not clean, the food and drinks are not served. However the cost is cheap so a lot of people, especially Vietnamese youth, prefer Nha Nghi. When Japanese people hear about hostels, they think about bunk beds and staying in the same room with people they don’t know, just like in youth hostels, but Nha Nghi are different from that.

Feature 3: Ask about good restaurants from friends and families

The pleasure of travel is “eating”. This is also true for Vietnamese people, 57% of them answered that the pleasure of travel is eating. So how do they find dining places in tourist spots? In Japan, people make use of guidebooks like “co-trip” or “tabelog”. In Vietnam although websites such as Foody are becoming popular in urban areas, there are no guidebooks and in the countryside, information on the internet is also limited.

For Vietnamese people, the information source is “information from friends and families”. For example, they ask about good restaurants from friends who are local people, then come to these restaurants. On average, Vietnamese people have a few hundred friends on Facebook, so this is a very helpful information source.

Ranking of famous travel destinations for Vietnamese people

Among Japanese tourists, destinations such as Hoi An, or recently Phu Quoc are famous, but what are the destinations which Vietnamese people recommend? 500 respondents in the survey recommended the destinations below. Travel destinations liked by Vietnamese people are “places with beautiful views (63%)”, “beautiful beaches (43%)”. The following ranking shows their opinions.