Tourists will have opportunities to wander on shady roads whenever they come to Hue
Being green and clean
Recently, on the occasion of coming to Hue to survey new tourist destinations, Mr. Tran Van Long, CEO of Viet Travel Company said that, back again after a long time, he found Hue still a peaceful place with tree-lined roads and undestroyed natural landscape, which is its advantages for tourism development.
According to the research of the school of Hospitality and Tourism – Hue University on the tourist attractability of Hue’s destinations, the three most important factors to make the tourists choose Hue are natural landscape, cultural attractiveness, and security and safety. Despite some differences in choice between the domestic and international tourists, they both highlight natural landscape as the first reason for their trip to Hue.
On June 28, 2016, Hue surpassed 125 cities from all over the world to be honored as “The National Green City” by International Union for Conservation of Nature. With the city’s efforts to conserve natural landscape and environmental hygiene, at the end of December 2017, Vietnam National Administration of Tourism notified that Hue was honored as an “ASEAN clean tourist city”. This award was presented to Hue at ASEAN Tourism Forum - ATF 2018 held on January 24 to 26 in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
At present, many tourist companies in Hue has deployed tours based on the element of environmental and natural landscape protection. Mr. Tran Quang Hao, Director of Huetourist said that the tour “Thuy Bieu in the morning- Tam Giang in the afternoon” aims to help tourists have a close experience with the nature, which also is the trend of ecotourism development in the world. Accordingly, the energy source used to serve tourists in Thuy Bieu homestays is solar energy. Coming to Thuy Bieu, tourists also have opportunities along with local people to garden, plant trees and enjoy the living values which are inherent in nature.
Mr. Nguyen Van Phuc, Deputy director of Tourism Department commented that green tourism is developing in Hue and attracting more and more tourists. In addition to the meaning of environmental, biological conservation, the green tourist development has offered many benefits, creating opportunities of employment and improving local people’s income. Moreover, green tourism also contributes to the enhancement of the public intellectuality and health through environmental protection and leisure activities.
The shady tree lines which have just been planted on the way to Hue Citadel
Sustainable development of Hue tourism
According to Mr. Nguyen Van Phuc, since 2008 Thua Thien Hue Province has had the plan of sustainable development in the period of 2008 - 2020, including the awareness of protecting the locality’s tourist resources, especially the elements of natural environment and cultural heritage with the orientation of sustainable tourism development.
“For tourism to sustainably and effectively develop to the orientation, Hue tourism industry has focused on implementing many solutions, planning to carefully develop each tourism product from the beginning to secure benefits to the local community such as cultural respect, natural resource protection; improving the competitive capability with other tourist destinations in the area, integrating endemic cultural and environmental conservation principles to create new attractive productions, bringing pleasure to tourists while still keeping the integrity of the local culture, natural values and heritage values,” Mr. Nguyen Van Phuc said.
According to the leaders of Tourism Department, one of the orientations to develop Hue’s tourism is preserving local values through the development of eco-friendly careers and the most economical use of nonrenewable energy sources, attaching special importance to the protection of natural environment and social environment at tourist sites; each business has to maintain the inherent natural ecosystem at tourist sites whenever organizing tours.
Tourist development is an indispensable mission, and environmental protection will help sustainable development, which Hue is doing very well.
Story and photos: Duc Quang