Vietnam's tourism in the context of global integration.

On December 29, 2009, the Faculty of Tourism of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities organized a seminar on the topic: "Vietnamese Tourism in the Trend of Global Integration," with the participation of many researchers and lecturers of the Faculty, as well as representatives from many agencies and businesses working in the tourism sector.

The main focus of the seminar was to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing Vietnam's tourism industry in the context of integration and to propose solutions to overcome them.

Reports generally agree that integration with the global economy has had a profound impact on all aspects of our country's economy, especially on tourism. Vietnamese tourism faces many challenges, such as increasing competition among countries; economic crises, along with natural disasters and epidemics, reducing the attractiveness of tourism; and a shortage of both the quantity and quality of human resources working in the tourism industry.

Despite the challenges, several new signals have emerged indicating promising prospects for the development of Vietnamese tourism in the coming period, such as: the rapid economic recovery of the Asia-Pacific region compared to other regions of the world; major global events and many national events in Vietnam taking place in 2010, which present great opportunities for tourism development...

One of the topics that received much research and discussion at this seminar was the current situation and solutions for training tourism human resources in Vietnam. The proposed solutions to improve training quality focused on the following areas: strengthening close links between training institutions and businesses by inviting businesses to participate and contribute to the training process; enhancing vocational skills in training programs; early specialization to create opportunities for students to receive more in-depth training; investing in improving the quality of foreign language teaching; strengthening foundational knowledge of culture and society for tourism students; and developing an open, up-to-date, and interconnected tourism training program with tourism training programs worldwide.