Two hotels in Nha Trang City, Khanh Hoa Province, south-central Vietnam were fined VND10 million (US$424) each for improperly upgrading their hotel star ratings to promote their services on online travel websites and social media, local authorities said on Monday.

The two hotels are Areca on Phuong Cau Street in Van Thanh Ward and B&N on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street in Loc Tho Ward.

Areca declared itself as a four-star hotel and B&N stated the same on its Facebook page.

Both also listed themselves as four-star hotels on travel and accommodation booking platform Booking.com.

However, the result of an inspection by the Khanh Hoa Department of Information and Communications showed that Areca has not yet been recognized by any state agency and B&N was rated only three-star by authorities.

As a result, the owners of the two hotels were fined VND10 million each and were required to remove the false declarations.

A leader of the Khanh Hoa Department of Information and Communications said that it is difficult to handle fake grading on accommodation booking platforms, such as Booking.com and Agoda.com, given their physical absence in Vietnam and overseas server locations. 

Owners of hotels that are detected with incorrect star ratings often shift the responsibility to the foreign platforms.

As of early 2023, Khanh Hoa has had 1,148 tourist accommodation establishments, including 102 rated 3- to 5-star, accounting for nearly 50 percent of the total number of hotel rooms in the coastal tourist province.

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Vietnam’s national flag carrier Vietnam Airlines has resumed its regular flights linking Hanoi and Beijing after a three-year pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The airline’s flight VN513 departed from Beijing at 3:30 pm and landed in Hanoi at 5.55 pm on Sunday.

Before the resumption of the Beijing-Hanoi flight, Vietnam Airlines held a welcoming ceremony for the passengers on board at Beijing International Airport, with the participation of Vietnam and China’s competent agencies and enterprises and over 100 passengers.

The air carrier is operating the Hanoi-Beijing air route with a frequency of three round-trip flights a week.

The airline will start increasing its frequency from mid-2023, while planning to open an air route connecting with Beijing’s Daxing International Airport.

China is one of Vietnam Airlines’ biggest international source markets. The air carrier has reopened most of its air routes linking Vietnam to China, said a representative of the airline.

The airline will resume four air routes connecting Da Nang in Vietnam’s central region with China’s Guangzhou, Shanghai and Chengdu, and between Hanoi and Chengdu in the coming months. 

Vietnam Airlines is set to use wide-body Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 aircraft for its routes with China.

The resumption of air services between the two countries will contribute to speeding up the post-pandemic tourism recovery and driving up bilateral trading activities, apart from helping fulfill Vietnam’s target of attracting international tourists in 2023.

Vietnam looks to serve 110 million tourists in 2023, with some eight million from abroad and 102 million domestic visitors. The country is also expected to earn about VND650 trillion (US$27.5 billion) in tourism revenue this year.

In 2022, over 3.66 million international tourists traveled to Vietnam, a year-on-year surge of 23.3-fold, according to data from the General Statistics Office of Vietnam.

Over 89 percent of the total arrived in Vietnam by air, up 29.5-fold against 2021, local media reported.

After China added Vietnam to its list of approved countries for group tours on March 15, Vietnamese airlines are racing to transport passengers between the two destinations. 

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