The HCM City-based Tre (Youth) publishing house has published a special guidebook featuring 100 top tourist sites in cities and provinces across Viet Nam.
The guidebook, Kham Pha 100 Diem Den Thu Vi (Discovering 100 Interesting Tourist Sites), features attractions such as city cafes, traditional handicraft villages, scenic landscapes and places of historic interest.
The 131-page book includes colour photos and text by cultural experts who offer detailed information on history, culture and lifestyle as well as geographic and climate conditions of each tourist site.
The book, published in Vietnamese, is the result of a national competition in April organised by Nokia Viet Nam and its partner, Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.
The event encourages young people to tour the country to learn more about its history and beauty.
The aim was to list the 100 most favourite tourist sites selected from submissions from more than 2,000 individuals and groups, who sent photos and texts their trips through the website www.tuoitre.com.vn/khampha100diemden.
The top 100 sites were selected and voted on by the website’s users and judges who are professional cultural researchers and travellers.
"We hope our book will be entertaining for local and foreign readers, particularly those working in history, culture and tourism, and will offer them new and useful knowledge," Nguyen Ha Duc Minh, marketing manager of Nokia Viet Nam, said.
More than 2,000 copies of the book will be delivered to local and foreign tourist agencies and companies in major cities including Ha Noi, HCM City and Da Nang.
Quality guidebooks
The guidebook, professionally designed with striking photos and concisely written text, is a departure of sorts from most locally published guides.
In recent years several billion dong have been spent on national tourism campaigns covering local media, advertising and marketing activities abroad.
Tourist authorities, however, are still not paying adequate attention to producing their own guidebooks, a commodity in high demand among visitors keen to explore the country, industry experts have said.
Foreign guidebooks, written by foreign writers and editors, dominate the market.
Tourism officials said that while the number of local and foreign tourists was rising, few publishing companies and tourist services have printed quality guidebooks.
Many locally produced guidebooks translated in foreign languages suffer from poor writing or uninteresting information and lose out to higher quality productions published abroad.
"Both local and foreign visitors prefer guidebooks detailing specific events related to Viet Nam’s culture, lifestyle and history and the books published by some local printing producers are not to their taste," said Van Thien Dung, a freelance tourist guide in HCM City.
"Many foreigners have heard about our city through relatives or friends. But they complain that they have found it hard to find comprehensive information about local tourist attractions.
Chinese tourist Ming Wenjy, in HCM City for a two-week visit, complained that local guidebooks could not compete with overseas publications.
"Your tourist companies are very professional and provide quality services, but they cannot give their customers a simple thing, a good guidebook," said Wenjy, who used a Lonely Planet guidebook while in Viet Nam.
To improve the number and quality of guidebooks, experts have said that tourism authorities and publishing houses must cooperate more closely to produce books featuring Viet Nam’s historic events, national heroes, festivals, landscapes and people’s traditional culture and lifestyle.
Viet Nam attracted nearly four million foreign visitors last year.
The guidebook, Kham Pha 100 Diem Den Thu Vi (Discovering 100 Interesting Tourist Sites), features attractions such as city cafes, traditional handicraft villages, scenic landscapes and places of historic interest.
The 131-page book includes colour photos and text by cultural experts who offer detailed information on history, culture and lifestyle as well as geographic and climate conditions of each tourist site.
The book, published in Vietnamese, is the result of a national competition in April organised by Nokia Viet Nam and its partner, Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.
The event encourages young people to tour the country to learn more about its history and beauty.
The aim was to list the 100 most favourite tourist sites selected from submissions from more than 2,000 individuals and groups, who sent photos and texts their trips through the website www.tuoitre.com.vn/khampha100diemden.
The top 100 sites were selected and voted on by the website’s users and judges who are professional cultural researchers and travellers.
"We hope our book will be entertaining for local and foreign readers, particularly those working in history, culture and tourism, and will offer them new and useful knowledge," Nguyen Ha Duc Minh, marketing manager of Nokia Viet Nam, said.
More than 2,000 copies of the book will be delivered to local and foreign tourist agencies and companies in major cities including Ha Noi, HCM City and Da Nang.
Quality guidebooks
The guidebook, professionally designed with striking photos and concisely written text, is a departure of sorts from most locally published guides.
In recent years several billion dong have been spent on national tourism campaigns covering local media, advertising and marketing activities abroad.
Tourist authorities, however, are still not paying adequate attention to producing their own guidebooks, a commodity in high demand among visitors keen to explore the country, industry experts have said.
Foreign guidebooks, written by foreign writers and editors, dominate the market.
Tourism officials said that while the number of local and foreign tourists was rising, few publishing companies and tourist services have printed quality guidebooks.
Many locally produced guidebooks translated in foreign languages suffer from poor writing or uninteresting information and lose out to higher quality productions published abroad.
"Both local and foreign visitors prefer guidebooks detailing specific events related to Viet Nam’s culture, lifestyle and history and the books published by some local printing producers are not to their taste," said Van Thien Dung, a freelance tourist guide in HCM City.
"Many foreigners have heard about our city through relatives or friends. But they complain that they have found it hard to find comprehensive information about local tourist attractions.
Chinese tourist Ming Wenjy, in HCM City for a two-week visit, complained that local guidebooks could not compete with overseas publications.
"Your tourist companies are very professional and provide quality services, but they cannot give their customers a simple thing, a good guidebook," said Wenjy, who used a Lonely Planet guidebook while in Viet Nam.
To improve the number and quality of guidebooks, experts have said that tourism authorities and publishing houses must cooperate more closely to produce books featuring Viet Nam’s historic events, national heroes, festivals, landscapes and people’s traditional culture and lifestyle.
Viet Nam attracted nearly four million foreign visitors last year.
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