Travel agencies arranging tours for Chinese tourists must now enter information about the hotels, tour guide licenses, tour bus numbers and other relevant information into an online inspection system before they are allowed to apply for entry permits for Chinese tourists, the Tourism Bureau said yesterday.
The bureau’s division chief Chen Mei-hsiu (陳美秀) said the information would be checked and a serial number will be granted to travel agencies that pass inspection, which can then be used to apply for entry permits.
“If the system finds that the travel agency hires tour buses that have been in use for more than 10 years, uses illegal hotels or commits any other violations, it will fail, meaning it will not be able to apply for the entry permit,” Chen said.
Meanwhile, Chen said that the Tourism Bureau would randomly select tour groups and check on the services they offer. The bureau will also survey Chinese tourists and ask them to evaluate the quality of their tour, she said.
The measure is scheduled to take effect today.
Earlier this year, a travel agency based in Kaohsiung left nine groups of Chinese tourists at their hotels because it did not secure tour buses before they arrived.
In related news, Kinmen has become a popular link to China, with the average occupancy rate of flights to Kinmen departing from Taipei, Taichung, Chiayi and Tainan topping 70 percent. Encouraged by the popularity of the route, Uni Air (立榮航空) said it would change to a bigger aircraft for flights from Tainan to Kinmen this month.
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