Many foreign tourists, especially Japanese tourists, love to make pleasure trips to Vietnam. They are not only touched by hospitable Vietnamese people, but also the taste of spicy Vietnamese cuisine and are impressed by spectacular handicrafts.However, despite their passion for Vietnam, they only return on short business trips. Here are several from Japanese tourists which can help us to figure out why they don’t make return pleasure trips and solve this situation.

According to these tourists, there are three main problems discouraging them from making a second trip to Vietnam. First, due to the complicated traffic in big Vietnamese cities, travelling in taxis is their only safe transportation choice. Nevertheless, they are harassed quite often by taxi drivers who always try to make as much money as possile. Second, in many of the country’s tourist destinations, no bathrooms can be found (and the few that exist are dirty). Last but not least there isn’t tissue available, even for women, in the bathrooms of well-known commercial centers situated in District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City.

Recently, this old bathroom problem has been mentioned in the newspapers and we should expect to see considerable improvements sooner or later.

As for dealing with harassment from taxi drivers, the Japanese tourists suggested selling all-inclusive price tickets for public transportation, as in Japan. This would mean that taxis based at points of arrival will serve the tourists when they present their all-inclusive price ticket, moreover, this solution will create fairer competition among Vietnamese taxi companies.

In addition, local volunteer tour guides should be deployed to provide necessary information about the history, geography, prices, and life of the local area for the tourists. Thanks to these volunteer tour guides, we would be able to reduce significantly the unreasonable bargains between foreign tourists and local sellers.

Yet we should also prevent volunteer tour guides from taking advantage of their job to work on commission for local stores by compelling tourists to make purchases there.