Flights to China likely to resume in April

Efforts to contain the coronavirus in the world’s most populous country have gained traction, Nguyen Dang Cuong, sales and marketing head at the airline’s Product and Sales Department, citing information from a VNA branch in China.

Although the branch has had to work online due to the epidemic, it has received inquiries from business partners about its plans to resume flights between the two countries.

“We have prepared plans to resume services between the two countries,” Cuong said at a meeting on February 20, held by the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, discussing the outbreak’s impact on the local tourism industry.

Vietnam suspended all flights to and from China early this month over the coronavirus, which emerged in mainland China in December and was officially named Covid-19 by the World Health Organization.

Before the outbreak, three local carriers — VNA, Jetstar Pacific and Vietjet Air — operated 87 routes from the cities of Hanoi, HCMC, Danang, Nha Trang and Phu Quoc to 54 destinations in China, with a total of 401 flights per week, according to data from the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam.

As for the northern neighbor, there were 11 Chinese airlines operating 240 weekly flights on 32 routes linking 14 Chinese destinations with the five cities in Vietnam.

Last year, Chinese tourists accounted for some 30% of the total number of international visitors to Vietnam. The air travel suspension has taken a heavy toll on the local tourism industry.

The national tourism administration estimated that the decline in Chinese tourist arrivals by 90%-100% could wipe out some US$2 billion from local tourism revenue in the next three months.

For the industry to recover after the epidemic, Vietnam will focus on Northeast Asian markets that are showing signs of increasing growth and the potential market of India.

Many promotional programs will need to be launched in China at the end of the outbreak as it is Vietnam’s largest source market, noted Dinh Ngoc Duc, director of the Tourism Marketing Department, under the national tourism adminstration.

Along with discount programs to woo tourists, Vietnam should ramp up activities to promote the country’s tourist sites on American news-based television channel CNN; large LED screens in Seoul, South Korea; and Chinese social media, he added.