The debate on the price of tickets for air travel across the Taiwan Strait has intensified with the approach of the Lunar New Year holidays, as market demand is poised to rise sharply because of large numbers of homeward-bound travelers.
The price of a round-trip air ticket between China and Taiwan for travel during the Lunar New Year holiday is around NT$20,000, about 35 percent higher than usual.
The watchdog Control Yuan earlier this week alerted the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) to the airfare issue, but the ministry said it is not appropriate for the government to intervene in the market.
“Even if the MOTC or the Civil Aeronautics Administration [CAA] steps into the fray and tries to manipulate the fares, lower prices won’t last for long,” MOTC Deputy Minister Yeh Kuang-shih (葉匡時) said.
The problem cannot be solved unless the Chinese government loosens its tight flight schedule for major cities in China and allows more cross-strait flights, Yeh said.
At present, there are 370 direct flights per week between China and Taiwan, a number that travel agencies say falls far short of demand. With the approach of the Lunar New Year early next month, the problem is likely to be compounded by steeper demand, as a flood of travelers will be trying to return home for the holidays.
However, airline companies said fares are determined by supply and demand and public information on the issue has been misleading.
“We have made four price reductions since August 2009, in consideration of public opinion,” an official at the Taipei-based China Airlines said. “But the truth is our aviation industry has entered the Chinese market too late, at a time when even the Chinese government can’t handle the tremendous demand for domestic flights.”
The issue was raised again recently by Taiwanese business people at counseling seminars that were held in China by Taiwan’s Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), SEF spokesman Maa Shaw-chang (馬紹章) said.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s tourism industry said it is reluctant to weigh in on the cross-strait airfare issue.
“We respect the positions of both the Control Yuan and the MOTC as the issue is a complicated one and both sides have made good points,” said Roger Hsu (許高慶), secretary general of the Travel Agent Association of the ROC, Taiwan.
“As stakeholders in the travel industry, we hope we will have access to enough business opportunities to compete and make a profit,” 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