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Taipei needs image boost

Hot springs, Roman Baths, Georgian architecture, museums and various cultural festivals have helped Bath, England, to become a famous tourist site which attracts millions of visitors each year.

Taipei, on the other hand, also has an abundance of hot springs, historical sites and several colorful festivals, but remains practically unknown internationally from a tourism perspective.

To raise Taipei's international profile and make it a more popular tourist destination, it is important to have a good marketing strategy and offer tourists a wide variety of attractions, Paul Crossley, a councilor from Bath, said.

"You need to constantly offer packages, and you need to combine several different strengths," Crossley said yesterday.

Crossley made the remarks during the "Culture and Tourism of Cities" forum, which was held by the Taipei City Government as a prologue to a Leader's Roundtable and International Healthy Cities Conference which is due to start tomorrow.

When talking about developing Taipei's cultural and tourism industries, Lo Chih-cheng (羅智成), commissioner of the city's Department of Information, described Taipei as a young city with a "vague image" that still needs to be shaped with experience.

"The city's wide diversity and friendliness make it a great destination for tourists," he said.

Crossley added that in addition to preserving Bath's heritage, the city has promoted its culture by holding many festivals with different themes, and also pushed the city as a location for films, enticing big Hollywood movies such as "Vanity Fair" to shoot there.

"I think the biggest difficulty for us is in building a distinct image for Taiwan. It is really hard to develop our tourism industry when so many people still confuse Taiwan with Thailand," secretary of Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs Kang Bing-cheng (康炳政) said.

In Bath, Crossley said, the image of the city has been so successfully built over the years to make the name Bath "magical" that tourists just like to go and visit, even though people can't even bathe in the famous springs as there are unsafe organisms in the water.

Crossley said he was not aware that Taipei or even Taiwan had so many hot spring sites before he visited, and he was surprised by the 101 Mall, which he described as "stunning in its design."

Attractions like the hot springs and special architecture, he told the Taipei Times, could be great selling points and should be used to boost the city's tourism industry internationally.
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