Red Tourism Development: A Case Study of Saigon Special Forces’ Relics in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

This study addresses those gaps by examining the Saigon Special Forces (Biệt Động Sài Gòn) relics in Ho Chi Minh City as an urban Vietnamese case of Red Tourism, focusing on tour guides as frontline narrators. We analyzed textual responses from 22 guides to six open-ended prompts using inductive content analysis with elements of grounded theory. Guides consistently emphasized the relics’ “hidden-visible” character, ordinary façades concealing secret spaces, which reliably produces surprise, immersion, and emotionally salient learning. They valued the sites as “living heritage” with cross-segment appeal (specialists seeking depth; general visitors seeking novelty) but identified fragmented governance, narrow capacity, uneven multilingual interpretation, and commercialization pressures as constraints on both ideological and economic outcomes. Proposed strategies converged on coordinated governance (e.g., city-level management and public–private partnerships), lightweight digital augmentation (QR/AR/VR; virtual tours), thematic itineraries, and systematic guide training to preserve authenticity while improving access and experience. Theoretically, the findings extend Red Tourism beyond China by foregrounding secrecy, more-than-human materialities, and the emotional labor of guides in producing “red memory,” while mapping frictions between commodification and heritage stewardship in an urban post-socialist context. Limitations include the single-city, guide-only, cross-sectional design; future work should incorporate multi-stakeholder, longitudinal, and mixed-method approaches.