The government is planning to cut landing fees at most airports in Taiwan, except Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport and Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport), in a bid to attract carriers to land at smaller airports, Minister of Transportation and Communications Hochen Tan (賀陳旦) said yesterday on the opening day of the Taipei International Travel Fair.
Hochen said the policy is expected to take effect on Jan. 1 to encourage more carriers to consider operating in second-tier and third-tier cities.
Landing fees are to be reduced by an average of about 20 percent at Taichung, Chiayi, Tainan, Kaohsiung, Hualien and Taitung airports, as well as Kinmen and Penghu airports, the Civil Aeronautics Administration said.
For example, the landing fee for an Airbus A320 at Taichung airport is NT$11,800 (US$374.92), and this would be reduced to NT$9,600, the administration said.
Thousands of people flocked to the travel fair on its opening day, with many of them lining up in drizzly weather to bid for promotional travel offers.
Liang Pei-chi, the first person in the line, said she came to the fair at about 9am — three hours before the doors opened — to get discount airline tickets for the Lunar New Year holiday next year.
“Whatever the economy is like, some people will always be passionate about traveling,” Liang said, adding that she comes to the event every year.
Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the fair saw redoubled efforts from several foreign tourism offices, including the Guam Visitors’ Bureau and the Marianas Visitors’ Authority in Taipei.
“Ms Guam,” the US territory’s travel ambassador, was joined for the first time by “Mr Guam” in an effort to promote the island, the Guam office said.
“Taiwan has become an increasingly important market for Guam, as it is our third-largest tourist market after Japan and South Korea,” office accounts manager Jason Liu said.
The Marianas office announced selection rules for its fourth “Intern to the Marianas” program, with the winner entitled to a monthly stipend of NT$60,000 to promote the US territory on-site.
The fair, which this year features 1,450 booths with 950 tourism organizations from 60 countries and regions, aims to attract 350,000 visitors over four days, generating NT$3 billion in business opportunities, said the Taiwan Visitors Association, which organized the event.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained