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THE FIRST international tourists landed in Vietnam nearly 20 months after the country closed its borders to contain the coronavirus.
Two charter flights carrying more than 400 fully vaccinated South Korean and Japanese passengers from Seoul and Tokyo on Thursday (11/11) to the southern resort city of Nha Trang, state media reported.
The area is popular with golfers, beach lovers, and scuba divers, and offers luxury hotels. The flights come ahead of Vietnam’s plans to reopen the resort island of Phu Quoc to vaccinated foreign visitors on November 20, 2021 in hopes of welcoming at least 5,000 travelers in the coming months.
Foreign tourists wishing to enter Vietnam must present a COVID-19 vaccination certificate and a negative pre-departure coronavirus test result. The country is desperate to revive its hard-hit economy after months of lockdown.
Its borders have been closed to international visitors since March last year and almost no commercial flights enter the country. Vietnam was widely praised for its handling of the pandemic last year, with only a dozen known cases of the coronavirus. But starting April, the highly contagious Delta variant took effect.
Vietnam has since recorded more than a million infections and nearly 23,000 deaths, as it struggles to secure enough vaccines for its 100 million population. So far, about 32 percent of people have been fully vaccinated. [sources/photo special]
