Luxurious tour providers target domestic market

Luxury tours usually do not have fixed itineraries. The clients who take luxury tours are always high income earners, who do not regret spending money on luxurious trips. And because they pay high, they always demand high quality of services.

Therefore, high grade tour organizers do not offer the tour packages with the fixed destinations. In general, they only offer the tours with only the information about the standards of hotel rooms, meals and the first destinations. Meanwhile, travelers would choose the services, destinations themselves, and all of their requirements must be satisfied by tour organizers, including the things which seem to be impossible.

Therefore, there has been no limitation on the fees for luxurious tours. The profits earned from high grade tours are always directly proportional to the capability of tour organizers to satisfy clients.

Luxury Travel, the first Vietnamese travel firm which specializes in luxury tourism, has said that every year, it serves some 10,000 VIP clients, while its revenue reached 30 million dollars in 2010.

It is not a surprise at all that there was the tour organized by Luxury Travel which had the sky-high tour fee of 1000 dollars per day per traveler. The travel firm always offers excellent services for luxury tours with luxurious cars and good looking drivers who can speak English well, with the tour guides who can speak two foreign languages fluently and have deep social knowledge. Especially, the tour guides have been trained in psychology to understand travelers well.

Since the tour fees are always high, luxury tours only targeted international VIPs – politicians, businessmen, famous persons, or MICE (meeting, incentive, conference, and exhibition) tourists. Meanwhile, the domestic market has been ignored, because tour organizers believe that Vietnamese people would not spend too much money on travel.

However, they have changed their mind when they have realized that more and more Vietnamese people have booked outbound tours recently. Big travel firms such as Saigontourist or Vietravel, which have designed a lot of outbound tours to far markets, including the Europe, Australia, the US, South Africa, Japan and South Korea, have reported all have reported satisfactory numbers of bookings.

However, analysts have noted that the outbound tours with offered discounts still can attract more travelers, even for the tours with high quality services.

This has been explained by travel firms that many Vietnamese high income earners still want to design tours themselves instead of using the services of travel firms. They also think that it would very difficult to change the habit: Vietnamese VIPs would father to take a lot of self-designed trips within a year, during which they do not regret spending money, than taking super tours provided by travel firms.

However, Nguyen Duy Hieu, Head of the Marketing Division of Viet Premier Tours, thinks that Vietnamese VIPs choose to travel by themselves because they cannot find high grade tours for them.

According to Hieu, VIPs take super luxurious tours remain an unfamiliar trend in Vietnam, because there are not many firms which can provide the tours specifically designed for them. It is also because the provided services still cannot satisfy their demand.

Viet Premier Tours is offering the first 6-star tours in Vietnam, targeting Vietnamese businessmen. The services of the 6-star tours include high grade cars, first class air tickets, 5-star meals, 6-star hotel room rates and the high quality services to be provided in accordance with travelers’ demands.

“The most important things that travel firms need to have are that they well understand what VIP travelers want and they can organize tours in a professional way,” Hieu said.

Source - vietnamnet.vn