Vietnam Emerging as Travel’s Newest Lure : Tourism: Industry experts predict a boom. Business people will probably be the first visitors.

NEW YORK —  Travel industry experts driven by visions of tourists hiking down the Ho Chi Minh Trail are betting on a sharp rise in American visitors after the lifting of the U.S. trade ban against Vietnam.

Hours after the embargo was lifted, U.S. airlines began rushing to add the underdeveloped, hauntingly beautiful country to their lists of Asian destinations.

The first wave of travelers is likely to be business people, some of whom will be trying to exploit the country’s potential as a tourist destination.

“It would have been hard to live in this country for the last 30 years without some consciousness of Vietnam,” said Travel & Leisure magazine Editor in Chief Nancy Novogrod, who predicts a sharp increase in tourist travel there.

“For Americans, it will become one of the most sought-after destinations in the coming years,” said Novogrod, whose upscale magazine will feature Vietnam and one of its French colonial-era beach resorts in an upcoming issue.

President Clinton’s move this month to lift the ban paves the way for direct U.S.-Vietnam air links and eases limits on how much money American travelers can spend in the country.

“It is a market where there is considerable interest,” said Jon Austin, spokesman for Northwest Airlines, which has applied for approval to fly from Detroit to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, via Tokyo.

Passengers are expected to be a mix of business people and tourists who previously would have had to go elsewhere, such as Thailand, to catch flights and arrange visas to Vietnam.

With cans of Pepsi rolling off an assembly line in Vietnam within hours of the ban’s lifting, a boom in hotel building is expected to follow close behind.

But tour operators say there are still few hotels in the country, especially in the less developed north, and little road and air travel.

“This is not a mainstream destination. . . . It doesn’t have the infrastructure,” said Sarah Timewell of Inner Asia Expeditions, which has offered Vietnam trips for three years.

“But something that’s forbidden is always exciting. This was something that was not only forbidden--Vietnam was a big question mark over the last 20 years for people trying to make sense of it all,” said Timewell, director of Burma and Indochina tours for the San Francisco-based company.

For a generation of traveling Americans, the failed war that pitted the United States and South Vietnam against the Communist-led North was the formative event in their lives.

Although two decades have passed since the U.S. government pulled out of the conflict in 1973, big-budget movies and a renewed fascination with Vietnamese culture testify to the lure the country has for Americans.

Inner Asia, a small company that offers specialized trips--from trekking down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to culinary tours--for between $1,200 and $5,500 a week, expects its business to double, Vice President James Sano said.

With the lifting of the ban also came the end of Treasury Department regulations that prevented tourists from spending more than $200 a day on travel costs in the country, industry officials said. They predict the change could also attract more tour operators.

For some Americans, including war veterans who opposed the lifting of the embargo while the fate of more than 2,000 missing soldiers remains unknown, the thought of tourists trekking down what was the main military supply line is anathema.

For others, the journey to Vietnam has been soul-cleansing.

“We lost so many American lives . . . there was so much bloodshed. Vietnam has a tragic sense about it,” said Patrick Collins, a congressional aide whose parents were anti-war activists.

When Collins, 35, two years ago flew ago into Hanoi’s airport, which was still littered with bomb craters, he found only a handful of Europeans and no other U.S. tourists.

“Once they found you were American, they were very, very positive,” he said. “They had left the war behind. They made a distinction between government policy and Americans.”

“The Vietnamese are really extraordinary people--they learn incredibly fast and they see things with a sense of humor,” said Timewell, who was going back to Vietnam this month for a third time.

“They find it very entertaining that the scrap metal from leftover American ordnance is sold to Japan to be melted down and sold to make Toyotas for export to the United States,” she said. “It’s the perfect Confucian notion of justice.”