More than 150 stores nationwide have joined the Shopping Quality Guarantee Program, which ensures that foreign tourists get the same price for all products sold at member stores.
Fifty-four new shops were added to the program yesterday. Most of them sell agricultural and fishery products, including factories that produce Alishan tea.
The program, implemented by the Travel Quality Assurance Association, was initiated this year following complaints by tourists about being ripped off when they purchased souvenirs at some of the nation’s tourist attractions.
The association reviews the qualifications of the stores before they are allowed to join the program. Should any tourist find any of these stores selling defective products or overstating prices, the association can ask the store to refund the customer. The association also has an emergency reserve fund to refund customers on the behalf of the store if the latter is unable to offer any compensation.
Emphasizing that trust is the basis for any trade, Tourism Bureau Director-General Janice Lai (賴瑟珍) said the program was implemented to make sure that tourists could shop knowing they would get a fair deal.
“Don’t treat our guests as fools; they will tell, and any unpleasant experiences they have will spread,” she said.
While the program is designed to protect all foreign tourists, the interests of Chinese tourists have garnered more media attention given the recent relaxation on cross-strait travel.
Association chairman Boggy Lin (林進榮) said that Taiwanese tea, pineapple cakes and Taichung’s sun cakes are the three most popular products among Chinese tourists.
Rather than spending hours in shops haggling with the salespersons, tourists can complete shopping within 30 minutes and purchase any quality item at a fair price, he 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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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