Tourism sector
The LAB-MOVIE project aims to create a Labour Market Observatory in Vietnam universities to analyse and understand the local labour market and acquire information about its demand and offer. The project focuses on three sectors: telecommunication and information technology, tourism and hospitality and agrifood. This report studies the current state of the tourism sector and labour market and identifies the typical professional figures of the sector through surveying and interviewing tourism and hospitality enterprises in the locality of Hanoi. The study is not intended to be a detailed and in-depth analysis of the local labour market but simply a “taste” that knows how to stimulate the curiosity of young people who, in possession of an adequate degree, do not yet have the ideas completely clear concerning the area in which this title will be spendable and more sought after. The observatory also aims to construct a dialogue between those who have the task of preparing young people for work and those who create work with their entrepreneurial activities.
The project has two main objectives. Firstly, from the analysis results on demand for human resources and professional roles of local tourism and hospitality businesses, universities can provide helpful information to guide students on employment opportunities. Secondly, universities, in collaboration with enterprises, will adapt training according to the practical needs of businesses.
Service in general and tourism, in particular, is an economic sector that is difficult to classify segmentations on occupation and employment positions. If the manufacturing sector has definitions and classification criteria as follows:
- Criteria on production technology: Companies will belong to the same field if they use the same input materials and apply the same production techniques.
- Criteria on market consumption: Companies will belong to the same field if they have the same output market for their products or if companies produce interchangeable products.
The above criteria can be applied to the tourism sector for classification. It is impossible to define the boundary of tourism activities and the input materials that constitute them because tourism is a service sector with various products. At the same time, the consumption market is vast and different. In other words, there does not exist an industry that produces solely one line of product and service for tourists or a branch of the economy that caters only to tourists.
To sum up the tourism industry, it is necessary to begin with a definition of tourists. The WTO (World Tourism Organization) defines a tourist as follows: “a tourist is anyone who goes to a place outside his/her permanent inhabiting environment (their place of daily routine) for a period of no more than one consecutive year with the main purpose of the trip not related to the earning money activity at the destination place”. From the above definition, we can identify three important factors for the formation of tourist behaviour:
- Displacement from the permanent inhabiting environment
- Not more than one consecutive year
- Having different motivations/reasons (entertainment, work, etc.)
Destination, time and motivation are three main elements forming the tourism concept. Accordingly, WTO defines: “Tourism is a social, cultural and economic phenomenon which entails the movement of people to countries or places outside their usual environment for personal or business/professional”. Since it is difficult to define precise boundaries, we can consider many sectors as tourism: from transportation, hospitality, restaurant, entertainment, media, health services and cultural heritage conservation services, architectures and landscapes, tourism promotion and management activities to agricultural production activities, activities that are indirectly related to tourism in the Agritourism type.
Although activities in the tourism field are very diverse and interdisciplinary, we can list some services that have the most important role and impact directly on the industry, including:
- Hospitality service: hotel, motel, campsite, homestay, resort;
- Restaurant service: restaurants, bars, cafeterias;
- Services provided by travel agencies such as planning, commercializing, purchasing and organizing tourism products: travel agency and tour operator;
- Tourist assisting service: tour guide, accompany, information office and tourist reception;
- Entertainment service: game park, mineral spring area, dance club, nightclub;
- Beauty care service: beauty centre, health care, mineral spring operation facilities;
- Cultural heritage management and exploitation services: museum, archaeological sites, botanical garden, zoo.
In the services listed above, we can identify some services that have a direct relationship with tourists more closely than the remaining services, such as hospitality services, travel agencies, tourist assisting services and cultural heritage management services.
Within the framework of the project, the research team focused on surveying human resource needs and requirements for an employment position in the hospitality sector, especially in 3–5-star hotels and the travel industry, to provide graduate students with the most realistic view of the labour market. For the travel agency, the research team surveyed travel agents, destination management companies, inbound travel agencies, and outbound and inbound travel agencies.
The determination of surveying mid and high-end accommodation establishments not only provides data on specific employment position requirements of the accommodation sector but also includes restaurant-related jobs or healthcare jobs because these services are often provided following regulations and classification standards imposed on national or local hospitality units. Article 4, Law on Tourism 2005 and Article 17 – Decree No. 92/2007/ND-CP stipulates that there are eight types of hospitality in Vietnam, including hotels; tourist villages; tourist villas; tourist apartments; tourist campsites; tourist accommodation; a household with rooms for tourist renting; other tourist hospitality establishments. By 2017, the Ministry of Culture, Sport and Tourism proposed to add tourist cruise ships to the list of hospitality. Thus, according to Vietnam’s regulations, there are currently 09 types of tourist accommodation allowed to register for business and exploitation.
To get an overview of the development of the tourism sector in Vietnam in general and Hanoi in particular, based on the statistics of the General Statistic Office and the Hanoi Department of Culture, Sport and Tourism, the research team collected and analyzed data related to international and domestic arrival to Vietnam in the 2015-2020 period.
The chart shows that Vietnam’s tourism recorded a significant annual growth for international arrivals from 2015 to 2019, with a growth rate ranging from 11.6% (2015) to 12.9% (2019). Within four years, the number of international visitors to Vietnam has increased 2.3 times. For the domestic tourist, the annual growth rate fluctuates from 11.2% -11.4%, and in 4 years, the number of tourists has increased by 1.5 times. However, when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out and severely impacted all economic and social sectors, tourism seemed to be the first and hardest hit sector. In 2020, the number of international and domestic visitors will decrease rapidly. International arrivals decreased 79%; domestic arrivals decreased by 52% over the same period in 2019, with the number of arrivals of 3,837,300 and 78,083,800, respectively.