Issuing Hoi An ancient town tour card

To deal with the increasing problem of ticket evasion and withholding of entrance tickets, Hoi An city (Quang Nam) plans to issue entrance cards for tourists to visit the ancient town.

According to the Hoi An Tourist Information Office, since the beginning of the year, 725 non-local tour guides have not purchased tickets to visit Hoi An ancient town, with a total of 20,300 tickets, worth more than 2 billion VND, including 13,800 domestic tourists. The city's Trade-Service-Tourism Joint Inspection Team has issued fines to 19 tour guides for violations in this field.

According to Ms. Nguyen Thi Nhung - Deputy Director of Hoi An Cultural and Sports Center, in charge of the Tourist Information Office, nighttime monitoring is very difficult because people actively evade tickets and many other reasons.

Hoi An honors the first visitors to buy tickets in the new year.

In fact, there are nearly 1,000 tourists in the old town every night, but the most tickets sold are only 100-200. There are many roads to the old town, and staff can only check visitors in groups or according to the tour program. Meanwhile, many travel agencies or tour guides organize for visitors to travel freely, in groups or in separate groups to avoid the inspectors.

Some new hotels also lack information about this ticket sales policy. “This situation makes the choice of ticket sales to visit the Old Quarter even more urgent. The problem is to have a reasonable plan to minimize ticket evasion, causing loss of revenue,” said Ms. Nhung.

Travel passport

Among the many solutions Hoi An is considering to control entrance tickets reasonably without disturbing tourists, the most interested and highly feasible is replacing traditional entrance tickets with "tourist passports" - ancient town entrance cards issued by the city.

According to Mr. Vo Phung - Director of Hoi An Cultural and Sports Center, instead of selling tickets as before, the tourist passport will fully integrate the contents, including ticket prices according to the regulations of the City People's Committee for visitors, information about tourist attractions and services in the old town. To avoid the situation of one person's card being used for many people, each person's tourist passport will have a photo attached, valid for the entire time the guest stays in Hoi An.

“When buying a card, you will enter a code, the card can only be swiped 4 times for domestic visitors, 6 times for international visitors. When a visitor enters relic A and swipes, the information will be automatically entered, and will be summarized at the end of the month. The card cannot be sold to anyone, it can only be valid for 24 hours, after 24 hours it will automatically be destroyed” - Mr. Vo Phung said.

Up to now, Hoi An is coordinating with UNESCO Hanoi and the International Labor Organization ILO to develop a plan called "Heritage Passport combined with electronic tickets". With the plan expected to be tested at the end of this year, the full update of information will meet the needs of visitors when buying tickets, while creating favorable conditions for managing and tracking all visitors when visiting through the transfer of information and images of visitors by computer systems and electronic cards to simplify ticket control at the relic site.

Mr. Vo Van Van - Chairman of Quang Nam Tourism Association, said: "The Association is organizing the contest "Accompanying Hoi An World Heritage 2015" to mobilize businesses and individuals to come up with initiatives to convey messages to tourists about tickets to visit Hoi An ancient town and the significance of buying tickets to preserve and restore relics.

The goal is to ensure that when guests from the agencies come, they voluntarily buy tickets to visit the old town, without hiding tickets, avoiding tickets, rotating tickets or finding ways to avoid buying tickets. A new, common solution for this is extremely necessary."

According to Zing.vn