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Pham Ha, CEO of Lux Group which specializes in luxury cruises, said his cruise ship Heritage brought 60 passengers onboard back to shore by Monday noon and temporarily halted the next tour with 60 tourists scheduled to depart this afternoon.
Ha said now is the peak of tourism season and his cruise ships are always full.
But the impacts of the storm are a force majeure situation so the company does not have many difficulties negotiating with passengers to find a suitable solution, he added.
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A group of tourists from Heritage cruise ship sailing kayaks on Lan Ha Bay, Hai Phong on July 21 2024. Photo by Pham Ha |
Duy Linh, representative of an overnight cruise tour operator on Ha Long and Lan Ha bays, said that nearly 180 passengers on his cruise ship scheduled to depart on Monday noon had to cancel.
Linh said there would be solutions to deal with the affected tourists, but rescheduling their tours was difficult because the cruise was almost fully booked until the end of September.
Ha Long Bay in Quang Ninh, about 200 kilometers northeast of Hanoi, is one of Vietnam's top tourist attractions, drawing tens of thousands of domestic and overseas visitors each year, many of whom take overnight boat tours.
Lan Ha Bay off Hai Phong, around two hours from Hanoi, is home to around 400 islands, all of them covered with vegetation. It also offers kayaking and canoeing through limestone karst mountains and overnight cruises.
According to travel firm Best Price, the Lan Ha and Ha Long Bay areas face unusual weather conditions between August and October and overnight cruise tours may be suddenly canceled.
On Monday morning, the company announced it would temporarily suspend its overnight cruise tour with 30 customers.
On Sunday, the Ha Long Bay Management Board reported that there were more than 18,000 tourists on the bay, of which 1,700 stayed overnight.
Authorities in Quang Ninh and Hai Phong stopped giving permits to tourist vessels to sail out and stay overnight from Monday noon, as storm Prapiroon is expected to enter Quang Ninh's Mong Cai on Tuesday noon, before heading towards China's Guangxi and devolving into a tropical depression.
At 10 a.m. Monday, the storm lay centered at the Gulf of Tonkin, with a maximum wind speed of 102 kph.
