Tourism Bureau Director-General Janice Lai (賴瑟珍) suggested yesterday that the nation’s travel agencies consider switching the focus of their businesses to the inbound tourism market as overseas travel has declined drastically this year.
“Amid the economic downturn, you should reconsider your niche in the market,” Lai said while addressing representatives from travel agencies nationwide. “The inbound market still has the potential to grow.”
Lai also said that the bureau naturally hoped that restrictions on domestic tourism could be loosened, not just those on Chinese tourists.
She emphasized that last week’s cross-strait agreements were reached after seven rounds of negotiations, and that the bureau will not be content with the status quo — in which only residents from 13 Chinese provinces are allowed to visit Taiwan, and only 33 travel agencies can handle tours to Taiwan.
Lai said the nation’s outbound tourist number dropped about 10 percent last month, the largest loss in a single month since the SARS outbreak in 2003.
This year, inbound tourists maintained 5 percent growth amid the global economic downturn.
Travel Agent Association chairman Yao Ta-kuan (姚大光) added that this year had been a bittersweet year for many travel agents. Natural disasters happened one after another, including a snowstorm in China, the Sichuan earthquake and the political unrest in Thailand. The nation’s travel agents were shaken by a number of other incidents, such as the bankruptcy of domestic and overseas airlines and rising oil prices.
The government also decided to allow more Chinese tourists to come in July, which brought new business opportunities, he said.
The fact that the bureau agreed to provide loans and subsidies to travel agencies would help them through the lean times, 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