The government is likely to lift the ban on visits by individual Chinese tourists by the start of July, Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday said, offering a further boost to increasing the cross-strait routes and flights of Taiwanese airlines.
Taiwan’s Tourism Bureau and China’s Tourism Administration are expected to finish discussing the details in early June, Wu said.
“The ban will be lifted no later than July 1, as both Taiwan and China want the change introduced as soon as possible,” Wu told a media briefing after attending a business gathering yesterday afternoon.
The stocks of the nation’s two major airlines both rose to their daily limits, with China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空) closing at NT$18.15 (US$0.62), and EVA Airways Corp (EVA, 長榮航空) closing at NT$24.65.
The two airlines have both supported the government’s decision to lift the ban on visits by individual Chinese tourists.
EVA spokesman Nieh Kuo-wei (聶國維) said the company expected its cross-strait routes and flights to further increase as a result of the change.
CAL remained optimistic about the relaxation, but also expressed the hope that the Tourism Bureau would ease restrictions on such visitors during discussions with China’s Tourism Administration, the company’s public relations manager Jessica Pan (潘文琮) said.
“If too many restrictions are imposed on visits by individual Chinese tourists, fewer will want to come to Taiwan and that would limit benefits from the change,” Pan said by telephone yesterday.
Currently, the passenger load factor on the two airlines’ cross-strait flights is about 80 percent.
“We have not seen the number of passengers on cross-strait flights climb, as the relaxation has not yet been factored into the number of passengers,” Nieh said.
However, Nieh still expected the company’s revenues in the second quarter to be up from the first quarter on the back of stronger momentum in its cargo business.
The busy season for the airline sector’s cargo business is usually the second quarter, while passenger business demand often recovers in the third quarter, Nieh said.
As for Japan’s massive earthquake, CAL and EVA both said the quake would have only a limited impact on their revenues.
Although EVA cancelled 55 flights to Japan, the impact on total revenue would be less than 10 percent, as the Japanese routes accounted for about 10 percent of its total revenue, Nieh said.
CAL also reduced its Taipei-Sapporo flights from seven to two per week starting from last Friday, though it had decided not to cancel any flights to Tokyo, Pan said.
“But we have used smaller aircraft on the Taipei-Tokyo route to deal with flights with fewer passengers, helping the company save costs,” Pan said.
Both CAL and EVA said the passenger load factor on their flights to Tokyo still stood at between 50 percent and 60 percent, thanks to continuing demand from business passengers.
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