The Tourism Bureau yesterday unveiled boy band Fahrenheit as its latest spokespersons, saying that it hoped the band would help boost the under-35 tourist market and increase the number of tourists visiting this year by 7 percent.
“Many people have asked me whether signing singers or movie stars as tourism spokespersons is effective — [I tell them that] in the last year alone, while global tourism was in decline, with F4 [another boy band] as our spokespersons, Taiwan tourism scored growth of NT$1.1 billion [US$36 million],” bureau Director-General Janice Lai (賴瑟珍) said.
The increase was notable especially because the number of Japanese travelers worldwide declined 1.4 percent last year, the bureau’s director of international affairs Wayne Liu (劉喜臨) said.
“Last year, the number of Japanese tourists who visited China decreased by 17.1 percent, while those going to Australia dropped about 25 percent — those who came to Taiwan, however increased by 0.42 percent,” he said.
South Korean tourists, who are rapidly becoming another important source of tourism revenue, also increased by 15 percent last year, Liu said.
With its new spokespersons, the bureau aims to secure its existing tourist sources while expanding into new ones, Liu said.
“Japan is currently our biggest source of tourists, with about 30 percent of all tourists coming from there. We want to make sure that stays relatively unchanged. [South] Korea is a market we are eager to expand into since it contributed over NT$900 million of the growth last year,” he said.
Japanese and South Korean tourists also spend relatively more during their stays, averaging US$262 and US$284 per person per day, respectively, while the average tourist spends US$210 a day, he said.
Fahrenheit was selected not only because of their popularity in both Japan and South Korea, but also because they appeal to fans under the age of 35, Liu said.
“The bureau’s previous spokespersons, F4, brought us tourists who were mostly over 35, so we want to reach new markets with Fahrenheit,” he said.
In the coming year, the four members of Fahrenheit will shoot television commercials, appear on special travel episodes of Japanese television programs and hold fan gatherings both at home and abroad, Liu said.
Fahrenheit will also make Internet appearances on popular multimedia Web sites such as I’m TV, he said.
“Excluding Chinese tourists, we are shooting for a 7 percent increase in tourists this year, with a target of 4 million tourists coming into the country,” Liu said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching