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An ancient pagoda in Hanoi.

Representatives of the top 43 travel firms in Japan, all members of the Japanese Travel Agent Association (JATA), will have a tour of Vietnam from September 8-12.

The Japanese tourism companies will make surveys of destinations that are attractive to Japanese visitors, such as Hanoi, Quang Ninh, Hue, Da Nang, Quang Nam and HCM City.

The Vietnamese Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Hoang Tuan Anh will meet with Japanese travel agents to encourage them to send more Japanese visitors to Vietnam.

“We want Japanese travel agents to see that Vietnam is still a safe destination,” said Nguyen Van Tran, director of APEX company, the organiser of this trip.

Japanese visitors are very sensitive to information about diseases. The number of Japanese tourists travelling to a destination often falls when there is information about an epidemic at that destination.

Tran said that there are some good signs in luring more Japanese tourists to Vietnam. “We have already scheduled 1000 Japanese visitors for December,” Tran said.

Last year the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) and the JATA signed an agreement to boost tourism cooperation between the two sides, aiming to raise the number of Japanese visitors coming to Vietnam from over 400,000 in 2007 to 600,000 by 2010.

However, the volume of Japanese visitors coming to Vietnam has decreased since 2007, with only around 393,000 in 2008 and some 198,000 in the first seven months of 2009.

JATA agreed to list Vietnam as one of the ten destinations in its Visit World Campaign, which targets increasing the number of Japanese tourists going abroad to 20 million in 2010. Other destinations on this list are Guam, Hawaii, South Korea, Hong Kong and France.

VietNamNet/TBKTSG