Travelers heading to South Korea can get full or partial refunds from their travel agents after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) raised its travel alert for South Korea, the Tourism Bureau said this week.
On Monday, the ministry raised the travel alert from “gray” to “yellow” for most of South Korea proper because of the escalating tension on the Korean Peninsula. However, it listed several small islands close to the Northern Limit Line as “red-alert” areas, including Yeonpyeong Island, Daecheong Island, Socheong Island and Baengnyeong Island.
Yellow alert means that travelers need to heed travel safety when touring and should evaluate whether they should still travel at that time, whereas red alert means that it is inappropriate to travel to the affected destination at that time.
The Tourism Bureau issued a statement late on Monday night in response to the travel alerts. For the yellow alert areas, the bureau said that Clause 27 of the Standardized Contract for Overseas Tour (國外旅遊定型化契約書範本) indicated that the travelers should be refunded in proportion to when they decide to cancel their travel.
Should the travelers cancel the tour 31 or more days prior to its commencement, for example, they would be refunded 90 percent of the tour price. If the notice to cancel the tour was given between 21 days and 30 days in advance, they would be able to get 80 percent of their funds back.
Travelers who decide to cancel the tour on the day when the tour began or after would not be refunded. The costs spent on applications of visas and passports would not be refunded either.
Those heading to the red-alert areas would get full refunds after deducting necessary costs, the bureau added.
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
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
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