Caesar Park Banciao (板橋凱薩飯店), the flagship property of Caesar Park Hotels and Resorts (凱撒飯店連鎖), is aiming to keep occupancy steady next year after a steep increase to 85 percent this year from 50 percent last year, marketing and communications official Zara Wang (王筱瑩) said yesterday, adding that daily room rates rose from NT$4,300 to NT$4,600 over the period.
“We’re almost fully booked this month, thanks to the Christmasland in New Taipei City festival that is attracting visitors from different parts of Taiwan and overseas with its music concerts and light shows,” Wang said.
The two-year-old hotel is within walking distance of the annual event and its relatively affordable pricing strategy has helped it win guests from similar-grade facilities in Taipei, Wang said.
The travel ban imposed by Beijing on individual tourists has had little effect on Casesar Park Banciao, as domestic travelers constitute its biggest source of customers, she said.
The hotel has also benefited from the government’s subsidies for domestic trips, she added.
Caesar Park Banciao aims to maintain its performance by keeping room rates flat, Wang said.
The facility of 400 rooms would focus on raising its profit margin by increasing the share of bookings on its own Web site so that it can save on commission expenses, she said.
Restaurant sales account for 40 percent of overall revenue, suggesting that there room for improvement, she said.
The hotel has altered its business model for its Carrara Restaurant (卡拉拉), which now serves cuisine from France, Spain, Italy and Greece using a semi-buffet format, Wang said.
The change aims to give the eatery an upgrade and set it apart from the hotel’s buffet restaurant Bon Appetit (朋派), 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