Vietnam’s World Heritage listed Ha Long Bay has made Fodor’s ‘no list’, a compilation of tourist destinations travellers should avoid, the Express is reporting. Reasons for making the ‘no list’ include overcrowding, polluted waterways, and rubbish often found floating in the bay.
Note that Vietnam is currently putting a lot of stock in its tourism sector to drive its economic development, on the back of a downturn in manufacturing. That said, it has struggled to recover from COVID-19 border closures with just 12.6 million visitors in 2023 compared to 19 million in 2019. This is in part due to changes to visas which saw the length tourists were permitted to stay drastically reduced–though these changes were undone in August 2023–as well as economic challenges in key sources of foreign tourists, Russia and China.
The quality of key tourist attractions, like Ha Long Bay, may also be having an impact as well.