PHNOM PENH, July 7 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia received 510,000 international visitors in the first half of 2022, up 394 percent compared to the same period last year, the Ministry of Tourism said on Thursday.
During the January-June period this year, neighboring Vietnam topped the chart of the international tourist arrivals in the Southeast Asian country, followed by Thailand and China, it said in a news release.
Kong Sopheareak, director of the ministry's statistics department, attributed the significant rise to the kingdom's full reopening, buoyed by its high vaccination rates.
"With our quarantine free policy, we believe that tourists will consider Cambodia as a major destination for their holidays and we hope to attract between 800,000 and 1 million international tourists in the entirety of 2022, an expected increase from only 200,000 in 2021," he told Xinhua.
Tourism is one of the four pillars supporting Cambodia's economy. In the pre-pandemic era, the country received up to 6.6 million international tourists in 2019, generating a gross revenue of 4.92 billion U.S. dollars, according to the Ministry of Tourism.
Cambodia fully resumed its socio-economic activities and reopened its borders to fully vaccinated travelers without quarantine last November after most of its 16 million population were vaccinated against the COVID-19 pandemic.
China's Sinovac and Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccines have been widely used in the country's immunization programs. ■