Foreign tourists' perspectives on the image of Ho Chi Minh City as a travel destination

Abstract

Ho Chi Minh City, a well-known South East Asia city, has attracted millions of foreign visitors yearly. However, many opinions from international travelers shared about their negative issues when they visited this city such as polluted environment, too much street vendors, cheating or robbery, dangerous traffic. Although the city has interesting culture and history together with many advantages on facilities for tourism development, the negative issues can affect badly to the city’s image and decrease number of foreign tourists to the city. Through this research, quantitative data from the questionnaire survey on 201 foreign visitors was collected for testing Ho Chi Minh City’s image in their perspective. The findings presented a more positive image of the city after visiting compared to before visiting. It also showed that Ho Chi Minh City is able to satisfy and attract foreign tourists when the image attributes can bring to them relax and novel feelings and fantastic entertaining activities. This study contributed on defining the image of Ho Chi Minh City as an international travel destination with purpose of building up right developing orientations for tourism marketers. Keywords: image of Ho Chi Minh City, destination image, Ho Chi Minh City tourism