Golf tourism vs Corora 02:02, 13/03/2020

By Hal Phillips

It’s impossible to know by the time you read this just where China, the rest of Asia and the world will stand in relation to the Coronavirus. I was comforted talking to Hong Kong-based friend who was adamant that SARS in 2003 was far more scary. 

So let me make a narrow point that actually has quite broad implications for Vietnam’s golf and travel industries.

In the business world, it’s always a risk to have a single client or vendor that comes to dwarf all others. Sure, having an enormous client that chooses to spend inordinate sums of money with your company feels like a windfall. It is a windfall. But there is danger (and a different sort of risk) in organizing your business around that gargantuan client or vendor — namely, you’re in big, big trouble if and when it goes away.

As I write this, in mid February, many Chinese businesses have been at a standstill since prior to the lunar New Year and some estimate they may not be back to work for another month. It’s impossible to know. As China is, in many respects, the workshop of the world, supply chains are grinding to a halt. As much of the country has been locked down (and other nations have temporarily barred entry to Chinese), the travel industry in Asia has taken (and will continue to take) a huge hit. It’s a good thing so many airlines are in some way nationalized in this part of the world. Otherwise they’d be going out business right and left.

China surely accounts for a large portion of Vietnam’s inbound tourism business, but the golf niche here depends as much if not more on South Korea and Japanese arrivals — short-term (in the typical golf holiday-making context) and long-term (in the expat living in Vietnamese context). So, be it the product of strategic design or mere good fortune, this situation could be worse.

The fear inspired by such outbreaks gives everyone pause, across business sectors and national borders. But now is the time to think more globally, not less.

Today, traveling golfers based in Singapore and Hong Kong have never been more important to Vietnam. They need to be convinced that Vietnam is should be the focus of their golf vacation. Ditto for golfers in Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, the Middle East, Scandinavia, all of Europe and North America.

I keep thinking of the National Basketball Association. For 10 years China was the fulcrum of its “overseas” marketing efforts. No other foreign market mattered much, so lucrative and outsized was the Chinese market. One ill-considered tweet, however, and all of that revenue evaporated more or less overnight. I’ve read that while the broadcast of NBA games in China remains on hiatus, the streaming of games has quietly rebounded (if you’ll forgive the pun). But you can be sure the NBA is today is seeking to create a spectrum of more robust overseas partnerships, to hedge its bets.

I’m confident that Chinese tourism will come back — fully. We’re talking about the second largest economy on Earth, its most populous nation and the focus of innumerable business plans across Asia-Pacific. But the current situation should serve as yet another incentive to broaden the focus of Vietnamese businesses that rely on inbound golfers — because the world is a big, complicated, messy place and you never know when that giant sure-thing is going away.