Tourism, as a services sector, is a key area for integrating a regional economy.
The VAP has a long list of measures for cooperation and standardization in
tourism, most of them with 2004 or 2005 deadlines. However, all of the
Vientiane documents are silent on the ASEAN Tourism Agreement, which the
leaders themselves had signed only two years before. That agreement, even in
its watered-down final form, contained more-substantive elements than the
agreements and programmes arrived at in Vientiane. As recalled in Chapter 5,
it would facilitate travel within the region, liberalize air services, allow wider
market access to one another's tourism services, preserve the cultural heritage
and the natural environment as tourism assets, ensure visitors' safety and security,
foster cooperation in human resource development in the tourism industry, and
expand the joint promotion of tourism. Yet, in the context of the ASEAN
Economic Community, the agreement seems to be all but forgotten. The
obstacles in the way of carrying out the tourism agreement are discussed in
Chapter 5. The VAP calls for doing away with the limitations on market access
and national treatment in the tourism sector so as to free the flow of tourism
services, bur sets the deadline at a distant 2010.