Travel businesses experience and exchange tourism practices with community calendar makers in Thuy Thanh commune (Huong Thuy)

More than half a year ago, during a cooking competition with American chicken organized by the Hue City Tourism Association in collaboration with the United States Poultry and Egg Export Council (USAPEEC), I was quite impressed when professional chefs from hotels, restaurants, and resorts in the city showed off their skills.

They came to the competition not for the purpose of winning or losing, but to take advantage of this opportunity to exchange, learn experiences and update new information on processing methods, ingredients and materials from units and culinary consultants from USAPEEC. A chef shared: “Each customer market has different requirements, including cuisine. To best serve and attract customers, updating knowledge and skills to improve skills is the responsibility of everyone.”

Recalling about a year ago, when the incident of a beverage shop near King Tu Duc's tomb ripping off customers occurred, among a series of comments from the online community, there was a pretty good opinion that: "As someone involved in tourism, you must also learn how to do tourism". Looking at this opinion more broadly, it can also be understood that in order to "make money" from tourism, to serve tourists, in addition to having to learn expertise, you must learn skills and how to do tourism.

Hue has the advantage of having a system of universities and colleges that provide training in many fields related to tourism activities and services; every year, thousands of students and trainees graduate. However, tourism trends are constantly changing, and Hue tourism is also looking for many solutions to expand the tourist market. Therefore, the story of human resource training is not only limited to the scope of schools but must be regularly trained and updated with knowledge and skills during professional activities.

Mr. Ho Dang Xuan Lan, Chairman of Hue City Hotel Association, shared that right before major tourism events, hotels often have training activities, coaching, and professional guidance for human resources. Training is not only about skills, but also about attitude and service manner to demonstrate service quality.

In 2024, the Department of Tourism organized many training courses to improve professional capacity in developing agricultural and rural tourism in Quang Dien, Nam Dong districts (now Phu Loc district), A Luoi and Huong Tra town; organized tourism training courses for many drivers and service staff on tourist transport vehicles. The Department also organized 4 knowledge update courses for nearly 400 domestic and international tour guides; trained more than 120 officials, civil servants and public employees in charge of tourism in wards, communes, towns, districts and towns in the area; trained to improve professional and technical capacity for workers in the tourism industry, such as training to improve foreign language skills for tourism workers in Hue for Dong Ba market traders and for tourism workers at tourist destinations in A Luoi district...

The leaders of the Department of Tourism affirmed that, along with solutions for researching, developing and perfecting tourism products, the tourism industry is very interested in training and improving the quality of human resources. One of the tasks set by the tourism industry is to implement policies to support businesses to recover their business operations in the new context, in order to create conditions for businesses to increase recruitment and training of tourism human resources to ensure meeting the needs of tourists coming to the locality, ensuring the quality of tourist services; Continue to pay attention to retraining and training tourism skills for business staff, tour guides, and the tourism community.

The tourism industry will also focus on implementing the project to improve foreign language skills for tourism workers in Hue city; strengthen cooperation with tourism training institutions to train and foster necessary skills for people participating in community tourism activities, cyclo and taxi unions, small traders... Focus on forming a team of local tour guides and tour guides.

Article and photos: MINH TAM