Cu Lao Cham, the cluster of islands off Hoi An that UNESCO lists as a biosphere reserve, will be monitored by AI cameras and move to electronic tickets under a city-approved digital tourism project.

The Da Nang People's Committee said on October 6 that the city will spend more than 7.7 billion dong from its budget on a digital tourism model for the islands, in Tân Hiệp, in 2026 and 2027, Thanh Nien reported. Viet Nam News reported on October 13 that the project was approved under the People's Committee's Decision 4524/QĐ-UBND and will be run by the Cu Lao Cham Nature Reserve management board, with data centralised in one control centre. The official framing is "smart eco-tourism, smart governance, smart conservation."

What's being installed

  • Management software to handle visitors, tickets, visitor flows, destinations, monitoring and alerts.
  • 15 AI camera sets at key spots to monitor, analyze and warn about visitor density. The point, officials say, is to let managers regulate crowd numbers before they hurt safety or the ecosystem.
  • E-tickets at Cua Dai: two barcode printers and four QR scanners at the Cua Dai boat dock, linked to the existing automatic gates.
  • VR360 virtual tours of 19 key sites, plus an aerial panorama of the islands.
  • Data links to the reserve's biodiversity and environmental database, a digital heritage system, a digital tourism map and the city's shared systems.

Why the islands need it

Cu Lao Cham is eight islands about 15 kilometers offshore, recognized as a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 2009. The city must keep meeting UNESCO's seven criteria for the Cu Lao Cham–Hoi An reserve, and it recently tightened rules in the core zone, banning many activities that harm the ecosystem, Thanh Nien reported.

Day-tripper boats out of Cua Dai bring large numbers of visitors to the small islands, which is why officials say crowd monitoring is the core of the plan.

What wasn't said

Neither report includes a visitor cap, a new ticket price, a start date for the e-tickets, or what managers will do when the cameras flag a crowd.

Sources

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