Cambodia to hone language skills

PHNOM PENH Cambodia’s Ministry of Tourism signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Confucius Institute of the Royal Academy of Cambodia, last week, to provide Chinese language courses.

Khmer Times reported the institute would support the tourism industry through language courses and offer technical assistance to the tourism ministry.

Tourism minister, Thong Khon, was quoted saying the MoU would open the door for tourism officials, students undertaking tourism studies and tour guides to learn Chinese.

The kingdom will attract around 2 million Chinese tourists per year by 2020.

“The country has to be prepared…the most important thing is language skill – the Chinese language must be used by flight attendants, immigration police, Cambodian tour guides, in restaurants, hotels and tourist centres such as the ticket booths at Angkor Wat.”

He added that there should be more direct flights to Cambodia from south and central China.

Currently, there are about 35 daily flights from China to Cambodia, 20 to Siem Reap and 15 to Phnom Penh, the report said.

Cambodia has a total of about 4,000 tour guides, of which 500 can speak Chinese. However, the ministry aims to increase this to more than 10,000 tour guides by 2020.

Last year, Cambodia attracted 4.77 million international visits compared to 4.50 million in 2014. Chinese arrivals ranked second at 694,712 visits in 2015 increasing 24.0% from 560,335 visits in 2014.

Chinese travellers are a major source of business for neighbouring countries particularly Thailand and Vietnam.

Last year, Thailand welcomed 7.9 million Chinese up 71.14% from 4.6 million in 2014, while Vietnam attracted 1.7 million a decrease of 8.5% from 1.9 million in 2014.