Tiếng Việt
普通话
The raging outbreak has forced many hotels to experience deepening difficulties.
“I closed a three-star hotel late last month, while my five-star hotel hardly serves any guests. Only 11 of the 370 rooms were occupied on March 1,” a hotel owner in Khanh Hoa Province, who declined to give his name, told the Saigon Times.
Latest data from the provincial Tourism Department of Khanh Hoa revealed that hotel businesses in this south-central province are in the grip of adversity.
The province’s hotel room occupancy rates averaged nearly 22%. The average rate of three- to five-star hotels reached roughly 30%, while that of one- to two-star hotels was a mere 10%.
Hoang Van Vinh, chairman of Nha Trang-Khanh Hoa Travel Association, said that some 200 small hotels had to shut down and thousands of hospitality employees lost their jobs 10 days ago. These figures are continuing to mount.
Once bustling streets in the resort city of Nha Trang are now quiet. The number of hotels with occupancy rates of 20%-30% is modest, Vinh added.
Due to coronavirus fears, even heavy discounts have failed to attract tourists. As a result, affected hotel operators have no choice but to reduce spending and personnel and seek assistance from the Government’s supporting policies on tax and fee reductions and debt rescheduling, Nguyen Anh Vu, general manager of the four-star Rosaka Nha Trang Hotel, told the paper.
The situation was the same in HCMC. The number of booking cancellations has continued to soar.
A representative of a five-star hotel in the city indicated that the coronavirus, which is linked to a disease now called Covid-19, had wiped out VND18 billion of the hotel’s earnings over the course of more than a month.
Besides this, growing concerns over the fast-spreading disease in Italy and other European countries has resulted in mass cancellations of tour bookings between Vietnamese and European destinations.
Doan Thi Thanh Tra, director of Marketing and Communications of Saigontourist Travel Service Company, noted that some 100 European customers had cancelled tours with the firm since February 26, especially when the epidemic started taking over Italy.
According to Tran Thi Bao Thu, marketing and communications director at Fiditour, most of the customers who had booked tours to Europe had rescheduled them for this summer or the end of the year due to concerns over the flu-like disease.
Pham Ha, CEO of Luxury Travel Group, said that his company had discontinued tours for guests from the Italian market as the Vietnamese Government has suspended the visa waiver program for Italians from March 3 to contain the spread of the disease and the firm is concerned that the 14-day mandatory quarantine will affect tourists from this market.