More than 100 travel and bus service providers blocked the entrance to the Tourism Bureau yesterday morning to protest the government's decision to give the Travel Agents Association (TAA) exclusive rights to handle Chinese tourist visa applications.
"The government has authorized a non-governmental group to receive the applications of Chinese tourists, to check their identities and to control the quota assigned to each travel agent," Tourism Development Association (TDA) chairman James Chang (
"How can you expect them to be fair if they are both the player and the referee?" he said.
PHOTO: SAM YEH, AFP
"The authority should be returned to the government -- the National Immigration Agency grants the approval to the Chinese tourists, whereas the Straits Exchange Foundation reviews applicants' status," he said.
Chang said the government should also not set minimum daily expenditure for Chinese tourists. He said travel agencies that provide bad service would soon lose customers.
Deputy Director-General of the Tourism Bureau Kuosu Tsan-yang (
Kuosu said that, compared with other countries, Taiwan has had only a few Chinese tourists flee their tour groups to try to stay in Taiwan illegally.
This could be attributed to a thorough vetting of Chinese visitors, he said.
The minimum daily expense requirement was also set to protect the interests of Chinese tourists, he said.
Kuosu said his bureau would need to review the guidelines governing tourist quota management with other organizations.
TAA secretary-general Hsu Kao-ching (許高慶) said that the association has members representing local travel associations from Taipei, Kaohsiung and Kinmen and other counties.
The interests of 2,713 travel agencies are at stake, he said.
Hsu emphasized that the National Immigration Agency is in charge of managing quotas assigned to different travel agencies, not his association.
The agency has reserved a 5 percent to 10 percent additional quota to enable it to regulate the number of Chinese tourists in a more flexible manner.
Travel agencies with better records will automatically be placed on the priority list for the additional quota, Hsu said.
He said that the association was entrusted by the government with the task of reviewing the visa applications of Chinese tourists. The association will contact its sources in China to verify each applicant's personal information.
This review process has significantly reduced the number of China tourists who flee their tour groups to stay in the country, he said.
Hsu said that association personnel handling the applications must sign affidavits promising to keep the confidentiality of their clients' information and to avoid conflicts of interest.
After the protesters ended their demonstration outside the Tourism Bureau they went to the Legislative Yuan, where they staged another protest outside the main entrance to the building.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,