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ietnam’s tour guides are learning Indonesian while its chefs are learning to cook halal Indonesian food in a bid to hike the number of Indonesian tourists visiting the country.

At a Vietnamese tourism roadshow here, an official said on Monday that to attract more Indonesian visitors, the Vietnamese government was providing more facilities for Muslim tourists, including mosques and halal restaurants.

“We encourage the [Vietnamese] hospitality sector to send their employees to Indonesia to learn to cookhalalIndonesian food,” said Ha Van Sieu, Vietnam’s representative to the country’s tourism roadshow. It was held Monday at the Redtop Hotel in Central Jakarta.

He said a lack of Vietnamese tour guides who were fluentin Indonesian was also a major challenge to getting more Indonesian tourists.“We are also sending more tour guides to learn the Indonesian language in Indonesia,” he said.

Recently, Ha Van Sieu said the Vietnamese government has invited Indonesian tour operators and media to experience travel in Vietnam as part of their promotion.

“Vietnam is a very beautiful country in ASEAN.[...] We know each other and [ASEAN] is becoming one single destination,”said Ha Van Sieu, Vietnam’s deputy of the national tourism office under its Ministry for Culture, Sports and Tourism. “So, our mission is to make Vietnam more familiar to Indonesia.”

Vietnam wants 100,000 Indonesian tourists annually as its government hopes to attract 12.5 million foreign tourists next year.

Ha Van Sieu said as of November, out of the 10 million foreign tourists who visited Vietnam, only 70,000 of them were Indonesian. However, the number of Indonesian tourists had increased again after it declined from 69,000 to less than 63,000 from 2014 to 2015, according to Vietnam’s statistics.

Within ASEAN, last year Indonesian tourists to Vietnam were also few in number compared to the 346,000 tourists from Malaysia, the 214,000 from Thailand and the 236,000 from Singapore.

Direct flights are available daily from Jakarta to Ho Chi Minh City, but no direct flights are available to Hanoi, one of Vietnam’s most popular tourist destinations apart from Ha Long Bay.

Most foreign visitors to Vietnam in 2015 were Chinese citizens, at 1.78 million, followed by 1.11 million South Koreans, 671,000 Japanese and 491,000 visitors from the United States.

The Indonesian Tourism Ministry’s deputy assistant for the development of the Asia-Pacific market, Vincent Jemadu, said that Southeast Asia was attracting more visitors. “Southeast Asia is experiencing the highest in growth of the tourism sector, [while the] Asia-Pacific is number two,” he said.

Southeast Asia’s tourism is growing by 7 to 10 percent, he said, “while in the Asia-Pacific it was only 4 percent […].” For 2017, Vincent said Indonesia is aiming for 75,000 Vietnamese tourists.

“I am quite optimistic that this number is achievable,” he said, adding that this year Indonesia has welcomed about 40,000 Vietnamese tourists. (sha)