Vietnam Seen as a Safe Haven for Tourists

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam -- Ever since a terrorist attacked in Bali killed 191 people in October, Tony Nong has been working 20-hour days. He’s hired two additional office workers and several guides. But the recent tourist boom still has him scrambling to find hotel rooms and answer inquiries from prospective tourists.

“Bali changed everything,” said Nong, a Vietnamese American who, with his mother, runs this nation’s oldest privately owned tourism company, Ann Tours. “Usually we get four or five inquires a day on our Web site from people planning trips six months in advance. Now we’re getting 15-20 a day, and they want to come in two weeks.”

After the October attack on the Indonesian nightclubs and terrorist alerts that Western embassies issued for many Southeast Asian nations, Nong and others say, tourists began looking for alternate destinations that offered security. And what came up on the radar screen of many was Vietnam -- a Communist country that in the decades after World War II fought wars with France, the United States, Cambodia, China and itself.

The Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Company today rates Vietnam as the region’s safest country for tourists.

Being considered a low risk as a target of terrorism has sent tourism surging. City and resort hotels that had been chugging along at 60% occupancy before the Bali attack are fully booked well into this month. Vietnam Airlines is predicting a 13% increase in passenger loads for 2002. The number of tourists visiting Vietnam this year is expected to surpass the 1.2 million record set in 2001.

“From a humanitarian point of view, we don’t want to capitalize on anyone’s misfortune, but the reality is we are drawing more tourists because of terrorism elsewhere,” said Nguyen Van Luu, a spokesman for the National Administration of Tourism. “Security and safety is one of the things we’re focusing on in international marketing, because we look to tourism as a spearhead of our economic development.”

Vietnam is an unlikely target or breeding ground for terrorists for several reasons. First, its urban population is largely homogeneous, composed of Buddhists and Christians. Its security apparatus is one of the most omnipresent and effective in the region. Its people treasure their hard-earned stability and terrorist cells would find little popular support, political analysts said. And terrorism aside, Vietnam is an uncommonly safe country with a minuscule crime rate compared to the U.S.

“I know of very few cities where you can get into a taxi at 3 in the morning, go to any area in Hanoi and have no fear for your personal safety,” said Nisha Agrawal, acting head of the World Bank’s Vietnam office. “That’s empowering, for residents or visitors.”

Tourism is a major source of hard currency throughout Southeast Asia. It is a $7-billion industry in Thailand, which attracts 10 million tourists a year but saw the cancellation of 32,000 hotel room-nights when travel warnings were issued for Muslim-populated areas. Indonesia earns $5.6 billion from tourism -- 60% of which was generated by Bali, before the October attack. Today hotels on the island barely have enough guests to stay open.

The Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations put terrorism and tourism high on the agenda at its annual summit, which was held last month in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It asked foreign governments to tone down what the association called unsubstantiated travel warnings, which are scaring away cash-rich visitors. The group said it would hold its 2003 summit in Bali.

Despite Vietnam’s five-star security, the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi closed on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, as did several other American embassies in the region, because of intelligence reports of possible terrorism.

The Vietnamese complained about the closure, saying it was unnecessary and brought undeserved negative attention. Among the U.S. government’s concerns were that the embassy in Hanoi fronts on a busy street and lacks heavy barricades to protect it against a suicide bomber in a car. Al DeMatteis, a contractor from Brooklyn who lives and works in Hanoi, came up with a temporary solution: He now parks his three dump trucks in front of the embassy’s main entrance.