Travelers start to make a list of destinations they want to escape to when COVID-19 is under control.

Bac Son, Lang Son province. Photo: Vu Minh Quan (Facebook)

Vietnam ranked 31st among the most searched places for a post-lockdown holiday as travel restrictions have prevented tourists from jetting off across the world on holiday, according to Official ESTA, the US visa service company.

Using Google Keyword Planner, the company analyzed the countries whose people are looking for their post-lockdown travels by searching terms such as “Flights to X” and “Holidays in X”. Vietnam is searched 628,000 times each year, according to the report.

Italy is the most searched place among 220 countries and territories, followed by Maldives, Mexico, Thailand, Spain, Canada, Greece, Turkey, Japan and Australia. Meanwhile, some countries including Georgia, India, the US had zero searches for post-lockdown travel.

Earlier, The Independent ranked Vietnam as the safest place to travel on holidays this summer.

Despite sharing a long border with China and a population of 97 million people, the Southeast Asian country’s swift reaction to the pandemic in early January, which involved travel restrictions, intensive contact tracing, the monitoring and eventual closure of the border with China, has stemmed the pandemic. 

Professor Guy Thwaites, director of Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU) in Ho Chi Minh City, said the Vietnamese government “very, very quickly acted in ways which seemed to be quite extreme at the time but were subsequently shown to be rather sensible”, according to the Independent’s article.