Travel Insurance: Not yet taken care of
Although stipulated by law, travel insurance has not yet received due attention from travel agencies and tourists.
According to the world's leading market research company RiResearch and Markets, the Vietnamese insurance market has seen increasing participation from international insurance companies. This helps stimulate market competition and benefits consumers. However, in addition to the strong growth rate of insurance types, travel insurance in Vietnam is still stagnant with a slow growth rate, not attractive to tourists.
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Therefore, when an incident occurs during a tour such as food poisoning, accidents, loss of property, etc., tourists are not entitled to any insurance benefits. According to the Vietnam Insurance Association: In 2010, the tourism industry attracted more than 4.5 million international tourists, more than 15 million domestic tourists and more than 3 million Vietnamese tourists. However, up to 95% of domestic and international tourists whose travel products are sold by travel agencies in Vietnam do not buy insurance for tourists.
According to the Law on Tourism, travel insurance is not mandatory for domestic tourists. In addition, because domestic tours are mostly short-term, customers often subjectively think that travel insurance is unnecessary. They only care about reasonable prices and do not think about safety and avoiding risks during the journey.
In fact, not only with domestic tours but also with international tours, tourists are not very interested in travel insurance but only consider it a mandatory condition when participating in the tour. Moreover, up to now, there are still no sanctions to punish travel companies that violate regulations, although according to the Tourism Law, domestic and international travel insurance companies must buy insurance for customers...
Currently, many travel companies are trying to avoid buying this insurance because, according to them, the insurance cost included in the tour price increases the tour price, while companies are trying to cut all costs to reduce prices and attract customers.
According to the Insurance Association, the current fee (VND1,500/day/domestic guest and USD1.5/day/foreign guest) only accounts for a very small part of the tour price. It is unreasonable to say that cutting insurance costs to reduce prices is unreasonable, because to have competitive prices, travel agencies can completely adjust and cut other costs. Moreover, travel insurance for customers is the obligation of travel agencies, not an option or an added service whose insurance fee is included in the tour price.
To overcome these shortcomings and help tourists feel secure when traveling, the Insurance Association believes that it is necessary to promote the necessity of travel insurance to businesses and tourists. At the same time, the Vietnamese Embassy when issuing VISAs to foreign visitors to Vietnam should also require them to purchase travel insurance as most embassies of other countries are doing.
According to Industry and Trade
