Myanmar to restart domestic tourism in Q3

Hanoi (VNA) – Myanmar plans to restart its domestic tourism in the third quarter of 2020, as a first phase of the country’s tourism recovery under the COVID-19 Tourism Relief Plan.

Under the plan recently launched by the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism, domestic tourism will resume soon to help 20 to 25 percent of the tourism sector recover.

The ministry and the Religious Affairs and Culture Ministry are in talks to reopen the pagodas and cultural sites so as to restart domestic tourism.

Meanwhile, regional tourism will resume in the fourth quarter of this year, by creating travel bubbles with neighboring countries such as Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand.

The ministry is expecting Asian tourism with countries like China and Japan in early 2021, looking at 50 to 60 percent recovery of the industry while international tourism is expected to come back in early 2022 with 80 to 90 percent recovery.

The relief plan consists of three main strategies which are survival - self-finance and stimulus package, reopening - relaxation of lockdown and quarantine and re-launching - reinventing Myanmar tourism and relaxing of regulation accordingly with respective timelines.

Under the plan, the ministry has taken measures such as waiving one-year license fees, deferring lease fees charged to affected state-owned hotels for six months, organising online training, daily allowance paid training and COVID-19 Relief Package training, and running Digital Marketing Campaign, Branding Strategy and E-commerce websites.

As Myanmar is seeing fewer numbers of local transmissions, a total of 1,074 hotels, or 50 percent of total numbers of hotels across the country, have reopened after getting health and safety inspection passes as of June 19.

As of June 20 morning, the country had reported 286 confirmed cases with six deaths./.