Tourism marketing in Vietnam for 2027: winning Korean and Chinese visitors with multilingual SEO and Google

November 2, 2026

Tin Le

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A family in Seoul is looking for a Da Nang hotel on Naver, while a group of friends in Shanghai searches Baidu for a Nha Trang tour. If your tourism marketing in Vietnam rests on a Vietnamese and English website optimized only for Google, neither of them finds you, and both book somewhere else before they ever board a plane. These two markets made up nearly 40% of international arrivals to Vietnam in the first nine months of 2026, yet Chinese arrivals grew only 1.5% and Korean arrivals fell 5.5% (General Statistics Office and Vietnam National Authority of Tourism, 10/2026). Neither market grows on its own anymore, so whoever shows up where these travelers search takes share from everyone else.

Tourism marketing is the work of putting hotels, tours and destinations in front of people who are planning a trip, on the channels they use to search, compare and book. With international visitors, every country searches in its own language, on its own tools.

International arrivals to Vietnam, January to September 2026: the numbers

The table below comes from the official data tables of Vietnam’s General Statistics Office (Cục Thống kê), released on October 3, 2026.

Market	Arrivals, 9 months 2026	Year on year	Share
Total	17,680,714	+14.5%	100%
China	3,953,429	+1.5%	22.4%
South Korea	3,058,996	-5.5%	17.3%
Russia	1,134,058	+160.6%	6.4%
Taiwan	964,024	+4.1%	5.5%
United States	746,158	+19.9%	4.2%
Japan	674,421	+9.2%	3.8%

Three takeaways for anyone doing hotel or tour marketing:

Korean arrivals to Vietnam fell for two quarters in a row: down 12.0% in Q2 2026 and down 12.8% in Q3 2026 year on year. With fewer Korean visitors, whoever shows up first in search results takes share from everyone else.
Chinese arrivals grew 13.2% in Q2 and 7.7% in Q3 2026. The nine-month total grew only 1.5% because Q1 came in below the same period last year.
83.2% of international visitors to Vietnam arrived by air. Flights are booked in advance, so treat the choice of hotel and tour as something that starts while the traveler is still at home, on their own country’s search channels.

The 2026 target is 25 million arrivals, which means each month of Q4 needs at least 2.4 million (General Statistics Office, 10/2026).

Two signals for the 2027 season

First, Government Resolution 325/NQ-CP, signed on October 12, 2026, pilots visa-free entry for Chinese citizens traveling in tour groups (two or more people) to Khanh Hoa province, on package tours organized by Vietnamese international travel companies and flying directly into Cam Ranh airport. The policy runs until December 31, 2027 (Vietnam National Authority of Tourism, 10/2026). Businesses in Nha Trang and Cam Ranh need Chinese-language content for both travelers and travel agency partners.

Second, the national tourism website vietnam.travel now runs in 11 languages, including Chinese and Korean, with a target of 15 languages by the end of 2026 (Vietnam National Authority of Tourism, 08/2026). That is destination marketing at the national level. Once a traveler has picked Vietnam, choosing which hotel or tour is the part each business has to win, and the answer has to be on your own website, in the traveler’s language.

Where do Korean and Chinese travelers search?

Korean travelers. In September 2026, Google had 47.97% of search engine referrals in South Korea and Naver had 43.06% (StatCounter, 09/2026). Optimize only for Google and you miss nearly half of Korean travelers. Naver SEO runs through Naver Search Advisor, and Naver ads run through Naver Search Ads.

Chinese travelers. In the same month, Baidu had 46.65% in China and Google only 1.46% (StatCounter, 09/2026). A Chinese-language website that exists only on Google is practically invisible to mainland travelers. Baidu’s webmaster tool is the Baidu Search Resource Platform (百度搜索资源平台).

Beyond search engines, Xiaohongshu (小红书) describes itself as a lifestyle interest community. Its official ad platform, Juguang (聚光), serves both search ads and in-feed ads (Xiaohongshu Juguang). In other words, Chinese travelers can look up a hotel, a dish or a beach directly inside the app. I have not found public documentation on account requirements for Vietnamese businesses on Juguang, so ask the platform directly.

StatCounter measures visits to websites that carry its tracking code, not total searches. Use it to set priorities, not to forecast visitor numbers.

Multilingual website: get the URL structure right first

This is the most labor-intensive part of tourism SEO and the part most often done wrong. The goal: Google, Naver and Baidu can read each language version, and every traveler lands on the version in their own language. International SEO people call this localization.

Choose a URL structure

Google Search Central lists three ways to structure language versions:

Structure	Example	Pros	Cons
Country-code domain (ccTLD)	example.kr	Clear separation, targets one country	Expensive, more infrastructure, some countries have strict requirements
Subdomain	ko.example.com	Easy to set up, servers can sit in different locations	Users may not tell which country the version is for
Subdirectory	example.com/ko/	Easy to set up and maintain, one shared domain	One server location, harder to fully separate versions

For small and mid-sized hotels and travel companies, I choose subdirectories: /ko/ for Korean and /zh-hans/ for Simplified Chinese. One domain, one CMS, and all authority builds up on the same site. A country-code domain only makes sense when you have an office and a content team in that country.

Google recommends a separate URL for each language, not switching languages with cookies on the same URL, and not redirecting users automatically based on a guess about their language, because users and crawlers may not see every version (Google Search Central). A language switcher at the top of the page is enough.

Add hreflang for Google

Hreflang is the annotation that tells Google a set of pages are translations of the same content. Each version lists every version, including itself. If the Deluxe room page has three versions, all three pages carry these three lines in the head:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”vi” href=”https://example.com/phong-deluxe/” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”ko” href=”https://example.com/ko/deluxe-room/” />
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”zh-Hans” href=”https://example.com/zh-hans/deluxe-room/” />

Add an hreflang=”x-default” line pointing to a language selector page for visitors whose language has no version of its own. zh-Hans is Simplified Chinese and zh-Hant is Traditional Chinese. If two pages do not point to each other, Google ignores the annotations. You can declare them in HTML tags, HTTP headers or the sitemap; pick one method (Google Search Central, 09/2026).

Google detects a page’s language from its content, not from hreflang. If the top half of a /ko/ page is still in Vietnamese, correct tags will not help. Translated versions are only treated as duplicates when the main content has not been translated.

Get the website onto Naver

Naver Search Advisor publishes a 10-step guide. The steps I do right away:

Register the website in Naver Search Advisor and verify ownership with a meta tag or an uploaded HTML file. Naver only accepts domains or subdomains, not subdirectories, so register the whole domain.
Allow Naver’s crawler, Yeti, in robots.txt and in your firewall. Do not block by IP, because the crawler’s IP ranges can change.
Submit an XML sitemap and an RSS feed with the full text of recent posts. Links must be absolute URLs on the registered domain.
Declare related channels such as Naver Blog, Naver Cafe, Facebook and Instagram with channel markup.
Check with a site:yourdomain query. According to Naver, content appears in results within a week of the crawler’s visit.

Content loaded entirely by JavaScript, and links that only work through JavaScript functions, are hard for Naver’s crawler to read. Sites built with drag-and-drop page builders should check this carefully.

Get the website onto Baidu

For Chinese travelers, register the website in the Baidu Search Resource Platform. It offers active link submission (普通收录), robots.txt checks, index counts and crawl error reports. You do not need a separate site for Baidu, but /zh-hans/ must be a full translation in Simplified characters, not a few lines of introduction.

Step-by-step example: a Nha Trang hotel preparing for 2027

Example (hypothetical): I handle marketing for a 4-star hotel in Nha Trang. The 2027 goal: more direct bookings from Korean travelers, plus a Chinese-language page for travel agency partners bringing groups through Cam Ranh under the visa exemption.

Step 1: List the questions guests ask themselves. I put myself in the shoes of a Korean family looking at rooms:

How far is the hotel from Cam Ranh airport, and how do we get there?
Is there staff who speak Korean or English?
Which cards can we pay with, and do we need to exchange cash?
Is it close to the beach, what is there to eat nearby, and what can kids do?

Chinese travel agency partners ask different questions: (5) group rates and the maximum number of rooms per day, (6) group menus, (7) Cam Ranh airport transfers, (8) the conditions of the visa exemption.

Step 2: Turn each question into a page or a section. Questions (1) and (4) become a “Location and getting here” page with a map and travel times. Questions (2) and (3) go into the FAQ page. Questions (5) to (8) become a Chinese-language “Groups and travel partners” page with a quote request form. Every page has vi, ko and zh-Hans versions with hreflang as above.

Step 3: Research keywords in the traveler’s language. I do not translate Vietnamese keywords. I check search volume in Google Keyword Planner with Korean as the language and South Korea as the location, and in the keyword tool inside Naver Search Ads. Example phrases to check: “나트랑 호텔” (Nha Trang hotel) and “나트랑 가족여행” (Nha Trang family trip). For the Chinese version, check phrases such as “芽庄酒店” on Baidu. Page titles, H1s and opening paragraphs use the exact phrases that have search volume.

Step 4: Register all three webmaster tools. Google Search Console, Naver Search Advisor and Baidu Search Resource Platform. Submit a sitemap with hreflang. Update the Google Business Profile: the name exactly as on the signage, a local phone number the hotel controls, and no redirect links to other pages (Google Business Profile, guidelines for representing your business).

Step 5: Calculate break-even booking cost before running ads. I compare bookings from ads with bookings through an OTA (online travel agency).

Booking value = 1,800,000 VND per night × 4 nights = 7,200,000 VND.
Assumed OTA commission of 18%: 7,200,000 × 18% = 1,296,000 VND per booking.
Cost per booking (CPA, cost per acquisition) = cost per click (CPC) / conversion rate. Assumed CPC of 6,000 VND and a 1.5% conversion rate: CPA = 6,000 / 0.015 = 400,000 VND.
Break-even conversion rate = CPC / OTA commission = 6,000 / 1,296,000 = 0.46%.

If the Korean page converts above 0.46%, a booking from ads costs less than paying the OTA. Below that, fix the page before raising the budget. The Korean page now answers concerns (1) to (4), and the calculation tells you when to add money.

Google travel advertising for foreign visitors

SEO takes a few months. Google travel ads fill that gap for Korean travelers.

Location. Google Ads offers “Presence” (people in or regularly in your chosen locations) and “Presence or interest” (adding people interested in those locations). According to Google’s internal data, advertisers in travel, real estate and education who switched from “Presence” to “Presence or interest” saw 5% more conversions on Search campaigns (Google Ads Help, global data from 05/2022 to 06/2022). I run the two options in separate campaigns and compare CPA against the break-even level from step 5.

Language. Google recommends keeping language and location targeting consistent. If you target South Korea, choose Korean, write Korean ads and send traffic to /ko/, not the Vietnamese homepage.

Automated campaigns. Performance Max and AI Max let Google find queries beyond your keyword list. How to keep that expansion under control is covered in AI Max for Search. On a small budget, I start hotel ads with Search campaigns on the hotel name and area name, then use retargeting for people who viewed rooms.

Mainland travelers barely use Google, so tour advertising budgets for the Chinese market go to Baidu, Xiaohongshu or travel agency partners. For costs and requirements that apply to Vietnamese businesses, ask each platform’s official agency.

When travelers ask AI instead of typing keywords

Google now shows AI Overviews at the top of many results pages. To get your content cited by AI, follow AIO principles: a short answer at the start of each section, sourced numbers, and opening hours, prices and addresses that match on every page. If you are considering ads inside ChatGPT, read ChatGPT Ads before splitting your budget.

Tourism marketing checklist for Korean and Chinese visitors in 2027

Use this table as your tourism marketing plan for Q4 2026 and Q1 2027. Move to the next row only after the “Check” column passes.

Task	Korean travelers	Chinese travelers	Check
Language version	/ko/	/zh-hans/ (Simplified)	Separate URLs, no cookie-based language switching
Hreflang	ko	zh-Hans	Bidirectional, with x-default
Webmaster tools	Google Search Console, Naver Search Advisor	Baidu Search Resource Platform	Ownership verified
Crawlers	Allow Googlebot and Yeti	Do not block Baidu’s crawler	Review robots.txt and firewall
Sitemap, RSS	Sitemap, full-text RSS for Naver	Sitemap, active link submission	Absolute links on the right domain
Key pages	Rooms, location and getting here, FAQ	Groups and travel partners page	Answers every question from step 1
Local profile	Google Business Profile: name, local phone number, photos	Not a priority (Google has only 1.46% in China)	Follows Google’s guidelines
Ads	Google Ads in Korean, Naver Search Ads	Travel partners, Chinese channels through agencies	CPA below OTA commission
Measurement	Bookings from /ko/, by source	Bookings and groups from /zh-hans/ and partners	Monthly report

What not to do

Redirect by IP: a Korean traveler already in Vietnam opens your site and gets pushed to the Vietnamese version.
One URL, three languages: /phong-deluxe/ switches language with a cookie, and Google sees only one version.
One-way hreflang: the /ko/ page points to /phong-deluxe/, but the Vietnamese page does not point back.
Traditional characters for mainland travelers: writing “芽莊酒店” instead of “芽庄酒店”.
Machine translation that no native speaker has reviewed, especially for dish names, room names and cancellation policies.
Optimizing the Chinese version only for Google, when Google has just 1.46% in China.

Measure tourism marketing by market

Split bookings by page language and by source: Google, Naver, Baidu, OTAs, travel partners. Each market gets its own CAC (customer acquisition cost). Hypothetical example: spend 20 million VND on Korean-language ads, get 40 new bookings, and CAC is 500,000 VND. For returning guests, add LTV (lifetime value). How to read the two together is covered in growth marketing metrics.

Whether you market a hotel online or run a travel company, treat travel agency partners as a channel: track groups, room nights and revenue per partner each month. Pick one market, finish the checklist, then open the second market.

If you want your multilingual website reviewed against this checklist and Google Ads set up for Korean travelers for the 2027 season, contact the Adtek team.