Vietnam among top 20 countries to visit in 2020

Many other Southeast Asian countries were included in the list with Indonesia taking the first position, followed by Thailand.

The Philippines and Cambodia came at the 8th and 19th respectively.

Apart from countries in the Southeast Asian region, the list named Portugal at the third place, Sri Lanka fourth, South Africa fifth, Peru sixth, Greece seventh and Italy ninth.

Countries ranked from 11th to 20th were Turkey, Japan, Mexico, Tanzania, Israel, Colombia, New Zealand, Ireland and Croatia.

The results were based on the choices of more than 600,000 readers across the globe submitting their responses and rating their recent travel experiences of the world's countries, cities, islands, hotels, resorts, cruise lines, airlines and airports.

Vietnam welcomed 12.9 million foreign visitors in the first nine months of 2019, a year-on-year rise of 10.8%, according to the General Statistics Office.

The office said the number of foreign arrivals from Asian nations saw the highest increase of 12.5%, followed by those from Africa, America and Europe with respective rises of 10.8%, 6.8% and 5.3%.

Vietnam's tourism sector aims to receive 17.5-18 million foreign tourists in 2019 and serve 85 million domestic visitors, raking in total revenue of VND700 trillion (US$30.17 billion).

(Source: NDO)