Travel agencies are placing their hopes in bumper Lantern Festival and Valentine's Day holidays after disappointing sales during the Lunar New Year holiday.
"The early arrival of the Lunar New Year holiday this meant people got their year-end bonuses quite late, and therefore they didn't have enough time to work out any travel plans before the holiday," said Victor Lin (林育德), a marketing manager of Eztravel.com (易遊網), the nation's largest online travel agency.
"Compared to previous years ... we estimate that sales of domestic tours slid by up to 20 percent this year," Lin said.
The company failed to offload some hotel rooms and packages to eastern Taiwan or Kenting, the most popular spots for domestic holidaymakers, the day before New Year's Eve, which used to be sold out by then in previous years.
People preferred one-day trips, such as to the Taiwan Flower Expo in Changhua, which says it has had more than 500,000 visitors, he said.
Eztravel expects to sell holidays worth more than NT$300 million this month, one-third on domestic holidays.
"Though we have outperformed our competitors, the sales created still did not meet our goal of NT$400 million as we originally expected," Lin said.
"We are therefore pinning our hopes on promotions for the upcoming Lantern Festival and then the next big holiday, Valentine's Day, to make up for what we lost during the New Year period," he said.
Star Travel Corp (
"We expect sales of more than NT$100 million in the New Year month [January], an increase of more than 10 percent compared to previous months," said Zoe Chen (
"Our exclusive online dealership of tickets to the Taiwan Flower Expo in Changhua County from Jan. 17 to March 14 also helped boost our business for one-day and two-day travel packages to neighborhoods near the venue," she said.
Eastern Taiwan and Kenting have become less popular this year, Chen said. But tourism in central Taiwan -- with its abundant resources such as historical sites in Changhua, hot springs in Nantou and spectacular scenery alongside the central cross-island highway -- has revived after the 921 earthquake in 1999.
The company is upbeat about sales of Valentine's Day promotions for people seeking a romantic night with their partner.
"And we have seen almost full bookings for rooms in hot spring resorts in Taipei's Peitou and Wulai," she said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day