Several hundred Taiwanese tourists in China are facing the disruption of their travel plans after the travel agency they booked their holidays with was thought to have gone bankrupt.
The first news of the problems came from a tour group in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, which was stranded in a hotel for much of the day yesterday.
China's Dalian Abroad Travel Company (
According to Tso, Dalian Abroad demanded yesterday morning that the 27 tourists pay the outstanding fees as a condition for allowing the tour to continue. Tso said each member of the group had paid some NT$40,000, the full cost of the tour, to Ying Lun by the due date of Jan. 20.
"The incident is obviously a financial dispute between the two travel agents and has nothing to do with these tourists. I will do my best to ensure their safety and try to complete the schedule," Tso told reporters via telephone from Shenyang.
The group was finally able to move on to Changchun City, Jilin Province, at around 5pm after Taiwan's Travel Quality Assurance Association (TQAA) intervened by promising that if the outstanding payments are not forthcoming, it would meet them itself.
The TQAA was set up by the Taiwan travel industry to provide financial assistance in such cases.
Chang Chi-yuan (
The tour group had left Taiwan on Sunday for Shenyang, where it had stayed in the Traders Hotel (
The 27 tourists from Miaoli, Changhua and Taipei, are scheduled to visit Changchun and Harbin and return to Taiwan on Saturday.
Chang said that he had received calls from 10 of another 35 groups that had booked their holidays through Ying Lun, involving more than 737 Taiwanese tourists.
The groups are traveling all over China, including Yunan and Szechuan, and were having problems with several Chinese agents that were working with Ying Lun.
The Tourism Bureau of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said it had asked the TQAA to assist the 27 tourists. The bureau said that it had been unable to contact anybody at Ying Lun.
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