An Ninh Thu Do (Capital Security) newspaper talked with the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Hoang Tuan Anh, about tourism prospects for this year.

Last year, the culture sector carried out a lot of international exchange programmes. Will they be continued this year?

Promotional programmes about Viet Nam have been conducted scientifically and creatively and have achieved significantly good results. This year is an important one for the country as it celebrates the 1,000th anniversary of the ancient city of Thang Long. The ministry considers the promotional programmes key and is looking to invest on a wide scale.

We will continue the exchange programmes signed with our international partners and boost negotiations for bilateral co-operation in culture, sport and tourism with Italy, Portugal, Russia, Romania, Peru, Brazil, Cuba and South Africa.

The campaign, Impressive Viet Nam, designed to attract visitors to the country with lower tour prices, has made a significant change to domestic tourism. What more can be done to attract visitors to Viet Nam this year?

To cope with the reduction of visitors due to the economic crisis, we ran the programme and it resulted in a turnover of more than VND70 trillion (US$3.6 billion) for the tourism industry, an increase of around 10 per cent over 2008.

The stimulus campaigns will continue on a larger scale with cultural and sporting activities attached in both key and potential markets.

We will also invest in national tourism sites, tourism complexes and hotels. We hope to have more than 25,000 rooms available to meet the demand soon. We will also continue the programme for the development of domestic tourism from 2010 to 2020 and towards 2030, approved by Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung.

Last year, restoration work took place at a number of historical sites, but it was of a very poor standard. Can the problem be solved this year?

The ineffective restoration of these sites, financially and artistically, has proved controversial over the past few years.

Our ministry's inspectors have examined improvement works across the country.

After the inspections, we also reviewed the list of construction violations. We then issued an instruction last May for officials to strengthen their investigations and inspections on the work.

We are preparing a standard process for the improvement of wooden historical sites and we can be sure that the process, once completed, will help reduce shortcomings in the improvements.

How would you judge the results of the national cultural programme from 2006-10 and what is going to be carried out this year?

This year, the programme has three key targets of preserving local cultural heritage, building and developing cultural networks, especially in remote areas, and supporting film-making activities to meet the increasing demand of movie lovers.

The ministry will monitor the progress of these activities in order to highlight any shortcomings as well as praise good examples.

The culture sector will also work to solve the serious degradation of tangible cultural heritage as well as the risk of losing intangible cultural heritage. We will also deal with the lack of facilities as well as regulations for cultural matters at all levels.

We plan to ask the Prime Minister to apply special mechanisms and policies to improve the programme.