Da Nang has been ranked among the top ten most outstanding new emerging destinations in Asia in 2014 by the users of agoda.com, a renowned hotel booking website.

Agoda.com reports the city in central Vietnam has experienced rapid growth, with intensive investments pouring into hotels, new commercial centres and infrastructure. Visiting Da Nang, tourists can climb the Marble Mountains (Ngu Hanh Son), surf on the beach and enjoy local marvelous cuisine.

The prestigious award marks the steady progress of this coastal city as it overtakes other localities in Southeast Asia, creates a momentum for the city to boast its great tourism potential, and makes more breakthroughs with the strong support of its local authorities, businesses and residents, Gille de Rauglaudre, a visitor from France, told Da Nang Today newspaper.

He said that he had visited many places in the world and he was very impressed by the beauty of the city, and expressed his hope that Da Nang will be placed even higher in the rankings by Agoda and other international websites in the future.

Meanwhile, Guillaume van Grinsven, a senior expert from the Netherlands’ PUM organisation, suggested that the city focus on developing more shopping and entertainment areas as well as building more two and three-star hotels for middle-class foreign visitors.

Special attention should also be paid to improving the quality of the local tourism activities and to upgrading local tourist sites, including the museums, theatres and cultural centres, to meet international standards. Furthermore, the focus should be on better promoting the locality internationally, improving the city’s tourism statistics by developing its major overseas tourist markets, and boosting closer ties between those involved in this sector, he added.

Besides Da Nang, other Asian cities in the list include Okinawa and Osaka of Japan, Kota Kinabalu of Malaysia, Kenting and Kaohsiung of Taiwan, Chiang Rai of Thailand and Lombok of Indonesia.

They were selected based on criteria, such as booming tourism and reviews from tourism experts who specifically go on holiday to discover and experience the beauty of new destinations.

The Agoda web company advised tourists to visit the top ten cities to enjoy first-hand experience there.-VNA