Lack of standard accommodation in Chi Linh

Both lacking and weak

This summer, I have some friends in Hanoi who want to go to Chi Linh to experience, they asked me about accommodation and food services in Chi Linh. It took me a lot of time to find accommodation facilities here that meet the basic criteria such as: good service, security, convenient transportation and reputation, ranked. After checking, there is only one address that many people mentioned when wanting to stay in Chi Linh, which is Sao Do Hotel (Sao Do Ward). However, this hotel was built a long time ago, many services are not as good as before. Although the hotel is in the center, convenient for eating, drinking and entertainment, it does not have a nice view, visitors cannot immerse themselves in the beautiful natural space of Chi Linh... Therefore, my friends only came to Chi Linh for a day trip and did not stay overnight. Not only my group of friends but also many other visitors did not stay in Chi Linh because of the above disadvantages.

In Chi Linh City, there are also some community tourism spots built by local people such as "Wind Farm" (Hoang Tien ward), "Green Hill Chi Linh" (Cong Hoa ward)... These places are just picnic spots for camping and having fun during the day, none of them have accommodation.

Currently, Chi Linh City has about 35 accommodation establishments with over 500 rooms, including 1 3-star hotel, the Sao Do Hotel mentioned above, and 2 recognized accommodation establishments for tourists, including Duyen Hai Hotel (Cong Hoa Ward) and Hong Loan Guesthouse (Pha Lai Ward), the rest are small-sized guesthouses. Thus, the number of accommodation establishments has only reached about 23% compared to the target of the Project "Developing tourism in Chi Linh City to 2025, vision to 2035" of the Chi Linh City Party Committee (the target of the project is 2,300 accommodation rooms).

According to statistics from the professional departments in Chi Linh, in 2022, there were over 850,000 visitors to Chi Linh, in 2023, over 1 million visitors and in the first 7 months of this year, over 600,000 visitors. The average length of stay for visitors here is 1.6 days/visitor. The average spending for international visitors staying is about 3.3 million VND/day and night, international visitors not staying is about 1.6 million VND/day. For domestic visitors staying is about 2 million VND/day and night, domestic visitors not staying is 300,000 VND/day. And only about 1.4% of visitors to Chi Linh stay overnight.

Need investors

Up to now, Chi Linh City has some main tourism products such as sightseeing tourism, festival tourism, sports tourism combined with entertainment and business tourism, conferences - seminars. It can be seen that the tourism products of Chi Linh City are basically associated with the space of the relics. The potentials of resort tourism, eco-tourism, weekend tourism, entertainment, community tourism... have not been promoted, the experience in tourism product groups is not high.

Tourism products are not diversified while accommodation facilities have not been invested in commensurately, making Chi Linh City only a tourist destination but unable to retain visitors. Local authorities have focused resources on renovating and upgrading relics, connecting traffic infrastructure, etc., but the call for investment in upgrading, repairing, and building standard accommodation facilities has not received a response.

The Chi Linh City government has pointed out the limitations in the local tourism development roadmap, which is the lack of tourism infrastructure, especially tourist accommodation, dining facilities, shopping areas for tourists, entertainment areas, etc. However, if we only rely on local resources, it will be very difficult to implement. Chi Linh needs socialized resources to attract investors in the accommodation sector.

In the Project “Developing tourism in Chi Linh City to 2030, vision to 2035”, Chi Linh City sets a target of over 2 million visitors by 2025; tourism revenue of about 221 billion VND; total number of accommodation rooms of about 1,800 rooms. To achieve this goal, investing in additional tourism infrastructure and accommodation to meet the increasing needs of visitors is one of the main solutions.

The People's Committee of Chi Linh City proposed that the Provincial People's Committee have mechanisms and policies to encourage organizations and individuals to invest in developing projects in tourist areas and spots. The locality will create the best mechanism to attract investors in general and investors in the tourism and service sectors in particular.