Vietnam welcomes 3.43m foreign visitors in Jan-July

Some 460,000 foreign tourists visited Vietnam in July, bringing the total number of visitors to the country in the first seven months to 3.43 million, up 17.3 percent over the same period last year, according to the General Statistics Office (GSO)

The GSO reported that the number of travellers arriving in Viet Nam for a holiday surged 11.3 percent to more than 2 million. Meanwhile, there were 590,000 people coming to the country to visit relatives, up 68.7 percent.
However, the number of visitors coming to work in the country decreased 2.6 percent to 570,000.
The GSO said more than 2.87 million foreign visitors travelled to Vietnam by air between January and July, up 22.6 percent over the same period last year. Meanwhile, the number of arrivals coming by land and sea decreased 3.4 percent and 21.4 percent, respectively.
Chinese tourists continued to top the list of foreign visitors, with 785,700 arriving in the first seven months of this year, up 53.5 percent. Meanwhile, there were 300,700 South Korean visitors and 273,400 US travellers in the same period, up 4 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively.
The number of Japanese, Taiwanese, French, Singaporean and Cambodian visitors to Vietnam in the period also surged significantly, the GSO reported.