Chairman of the Provincial People's Committee Nguyen Huu Hoai, Deputy Secretary of the Provincial Party Committee presided over the meeting.

In 2016, the Quang Binh's tourism sector has met a lot of difficulties in environmental incidents and natural disasters. Tourism business has seen a sharp decrease, total number of tourists to Quang Binh was an estimate of 1.99 million dongs arrivals, a 29% decrease from 2015 and 43% from the plan of 2016, of which international arrivals reached about 50,000 tourists, reduced 4.4% from the same period last year. Total tourism turnovers fell down 30% against last year and 46% from the plan of 2016, an estimate of damages on tourism was 1,800 billion dongs.

However, with a timely direction of the province, the initiative and creativeness of tourism business enterprises and the active support of local people, Quang Binh tourism has achieved some remarkable results.
Tourism promotion activities have been held with a large scale and achieved a high efficiency; many tourism products and forms of tourism have been developed; quality of services and human resources for tourism have contributed to tourist attraction; many positive changes have been seen in State management, creating a sound business environment, developing sustainable tourism, attracting participation of investors in tourism.

On the basis of obtained results, the meeting spent much time to discuss shortcomings and put forward main solutions to stimulus tourism, improve quality of services and human resources for the tourism industry, develop tourism products, popularise and associate to develop tourism in 2017 and the following years with a focus on tourism popularisation at international airports, opening a new flight from Dong Hoi to Hai Phong; ensuring environmental sanitation at beaches, upgrading some main traffic routes, especially road signs, etc.

Chairman of the Provincial People's Committee Nguyen Huu Hoai speaks at the meeting

Concluding at the meeting, Chairman of the Provincial People's Committee highly appreciated the great efforts made by all level, agencies, localities and enterprises in implementing the province's tourism development program for the 2016-2020 period.

In the future, Chairman Nguyen Huu Hoai asked the tourism sector to focus on promoting and popularizing tourism, especially spreading Quang Binh tourism on Tripadvisor and television channels of VTV1 and VTV4, setting up and deploying the Plan of Cave Festival 2017; pay attention to developmnet of new tourism products, improving professional knowledges and languages for tourist staffs; strengthening State management on tourism.

In addition, Chairman Nguyen Huu Hoai also required the Management Board of Phong Nha - Ke Bang National Park to strengthen tourism popularisation on world managizes; the Department of Transport in coordination with the Department of Tourism and related agencies to quickly open a new domestic flight from Dong Hoi to Cat Bi (Hai Phong) and an international flight from Quang Binh to Chiang Mai (Thailan).
Chairman also assigned the responsibility to such localities as Dong Hoi city, Bo Trach and Quang Trach districts to strengthen management on environmental sanitation, ensure sercurity and social order, creating favorable conditions to attract more investors to Quang Binh.

By Nhu Y
(Source: Quang Binh Portal)