Victor Chou is obsessed with the hotel industry. The veteran hotelier has seen Taiwan grow from attracting mainly businesspeople working in the IT industry into a tourist destination that expects to top five million visitors by 2008.
Along the way, Chou has played host to some of the world's most powerful people and famous celebrities, written a book and taken up a teaching post at a local university. Though he has to deal the rich and famous and grade papers, the crunch comes daily at 3am when he talks with his boss overseas.
"My chairman says to me, 'Victor, if you don't reach your target this year, you will be sent off to Moscow,'" he said in an interview with the Taipei Times.
He isn't planning on leaving any time soon. Chou, like some of Taiwan's other most experienced hoteliers, helped create the country's hospitality industry. He was brought in last year by Sunrider Group chairman Chen Te-fu (陳得福) to turn around the fortunes of the 27-year-old Sunworld Dynasty Hotel (王朝大酒店), which is about to undergo a NT$2 billion renovation of its 738 guest rooms.
The multilingual Chou — he's fluent in English, Mandarin and Hoklo, and can get by in Japanese and Cantonese — has been general manager of some of Taiwan's top hotels including the Lai Lai Hotel (來來大飯店, now known as the Sheraton Hotel), Sherwood Hotel (西華飯店) and Ta Shee Resort (鴻禧大溪別館).
"Before I joined the hotel industry, Taiwan was not really a tourist spot. We didn't have many resources so we needed aggressive support and assistance from our neighbors, like Japan and Korea. And the US," Chou said.
He sees 1976 as the year Taiwan's tourist industry got off the ground: "We didn't have enough hotel rooms to accommodate all the people coming to Taiwan."
Today, however, there aren't enough tourists or businesspeople to fill the rooms because the market is saturated with hotels.
Taiwan's tourism industry — and the island's infrastructure to accommodate it — developed from nothing to "30 five-star hotels," Chou said.
"The development and growth of hotels over the past 20 years shows that many people see Taiwan not only as a destination for doing business but also for leisure. In 1997, there were two million [people coming to Taiwan]. By 2006, there were 3.6 million people," he said. "There is tremendous growth."
Though the number of travelers visiting Taiwan has increased, the country still pales in comparison to Singapore and Hong Kong. Chou thinks the government's target of 5 million visitors by 2008 is unattainable.
He says the single biggest problem facing the tourism industry in Taiwan is the lack of international marketing.
"When I was at the Sheraton, 3.5 percent of the total revenue was spent on marketing. But … this is more than the annual budget of the Tourism Bureau. So how does it promote Taiwan?" Chou said.
"We need to get the word out. [Taiwan] should follow the example of Malaysia and create an international advertising promotion program on CNN, like 'Malaysia Truly Asia.' [South] Korea also has its own ads that are seen throughout the world."
Advertising to an international audience, he says, is the only way Taiwan is going to be discovered by the world and that process needs to begin with the government.
Chou places himself in the context of a number of scholars, bureaucrats and businessmen who studied abroad during the 1970s and 1980s, then returned to Taiwan to develop the island's tourism industry.
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