Eyeing strong seasonal food-and-beverage business demand during the summer vacation period, the nation’s hotel operators have been launching marketing events aimed at boosting sales in the dining sector.
Traditionally, hotels in Taiwan that focus on international travelers — such as the Formosa Regent Taipei (台北晶華酒店) and the Ambassador Hotel Taipei (台北國賓大飯店) — find it challenging to increase revenues during the summer months as a drop in the number of international business travelers tends to hit occupancy rates.
However, over the past few years many such hotels have been adopting a strategy of ramping up marketing aimed at boosting dining sales to offset weaker room sales.
“Demand on the dining sector, especially for wedding receptions, remained strong with undersupply from five-star hotels in Taiwan,” Formosa International Hotels Corp (FIHC, 晶華國際酒店集團) public relations director Ellen Chang (張筠) told reporters at the chain’s recent press conference promoting wedding banquets.
Despite fewer people holding wedding banquets in July and August — due to this period often overlapping with the lunar calendar’s Ghost Month — the Formosa Regent Taipei has still received orders for up to 10 banquets a day at weekends throughout this month and next month, Chang said.
The strong revenue contribution from these bookings has boosted dining sales for FIHC for this month, which demonstrated double-digit percentage growth from the same period a year earlier. The company posted about NT$162 million (US$5.41 million) in dining sales for July last year, company data showed.
Celebrations for Father’s Day on Aug. 8 are set to provide another marketing opportunity for hotels to boost dining sales for this quarter. The Formosa Regent Taipei is scheduled to offer a celebration menu featuring various foreign cuisines from Aug. 8 to Aug. 11, while Ambassador Hotel Ltd (國賓大飯店) is running a number of promotions for either in-hotel dining or independent restaurants next month.
Chateau International Development Co Ltd (夏都國際開發), which operates Chateau Beach Resort Kenting (墾丁夏都沙灘酒店) in Pingtung County, has a different business focus and is mainly targeting tourists from Taiwan.
This approach mean that the third quarter is the firm’s peak season, citing strong seasonal demand for family vacations.
Other than family gatherings, Chateau is planning to launch a series of marketing packages to attract couples to stay at the hotel and celebrate Chinese Lovers’ Day on Aug. 13.
The company is expecting revenue to continue to grow this month, following sales last month hitting their highest level in company history.
Chateau posted NT$71.33 million in consolidated revenue for last month, up 24.34 percent from a month earlier and up 18.69 percent from a year earlier, with its average room occupancy rate standing at 97.5 percent, the company said in its financial statement.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to