Localising for Vietnamese travellers

Advertising shown in Vietnam must contain Vietnamese, under Article 18 of the Law on Advertising, with exceptions for trademarks, brand names and similar. When a foreign language appears alongside, it may be no more than three quarters the size of the Vietnamese and sits below it. That is the legal floor for advertising. For everything else, websites, booking pages, menus, safety notices, the practical floor is set by your customers.

Vietnamese is written in the Latin alphabet with diacritics that change meaning: tone marks and modified vowels are not decoration. Text without them, or with them in the wrong place, reads as careless or machine-made. Check that your website fonts, booking engine, email templates and printed materials display Vietnamese characters correctly before you launch, and have a native speaker read every page in its final layout, not only in a document.

Vietnam's domestic payment network is run by NAPAS, the National Payment Corporation of Vietnam. According to its website, it operates switching for more than 20,600 ATMs and more than 741,000 card terminals, serving more than 80 million customers of 68 member banks and finance companies. Its NAPAS 247 service handles fast transfers between banks, and it promotes VIETQRPay and VIETQRGlobal, the latter for QR payments across borders.

Mobile banking is part of daily life: in Q&Me's 2026 screen-time study of 100 iPhone users, 91% used an online banking app each week. It is a small sample, but it points the same way as the payment network's own emphasis on QR products.

For a foreign seller this suggests three practical checks. Can a Vietnamese tour operator pay you by bank transfer without excessive fees? Does your online checkout accept the cards Vietnamese customers hold? And is a cross-border QR option available at your destination, through your payment provider? The answers depend on your bank and country; ask them, and test with a real Vietnamese payment before launch.

Survey data on Vietnamese outbound travellers is thin, so treat the following as signals. The Outbox Company's Tet 2025 survey found that international trips averaged five to six nights, that 44% of outbound travellers preferred all-inclusive tours, and that the average international trip cost nearly VND 37 million. Tet travel was mostly with family or a spouse. VOV reported that in Japan Vietnamese visitors were moving towards customised and self-guided trips and exploring beyond the largest cities.

• Offer family room configurations and connecting rooms, and say so in Vietnamese.
• Package what a tour operator can sell in five or six nights, including transfers.
• Give independent travellers clear public-transport and self-guided options.
• Time offers to the Vietnamese calendar; see the holiday calendar.